Pumpkin Carving

Since I was home sick most of last week, pumpkins didn't get carved in a timely fashion. To put this another way, we were gutting them less than an hour from when the kids suited up to go tricking and treating.

Time was not my friend...

In the past I developed a pretty reasonable set of tools for working on pumpkins. My favorite is a jigsaw blade I stuck on a plywood handle. I've found no better tool for opening holes in pumpkins. It makes the commercially available tools look pitiful. At some point I need to mount it in a proper handle and make it permanent. For now, it's working great.

The big addition this year was the Foredom flex shaft tool. I'd heard in the past that Dremel tools really didn't work on pumpkins. But I'm beginning to suspect that is incorrect, and that it was the burr that was at fault. I did try a stock Dremel burr in my Foredom, but it had a rotten time cutting.

The two burrs that really worked well were carbide burrs used for machining PC boards and the Tornado structured tungsten carbide bits that Woodcraft sells for doing woodworking with Foredom tools. At 14k RPM, these essentially liquefy the pumpkin. There's very little side-force on the handpiece as you pull it through the pumpkin, and the Tornado bits like to cut at a single depth, so you're not constantly fighting dig-ins.

In the end I was able to do two pumpkins, beginning to end, in less than an hour. One was a ghost design with two cut depths. The other, a cat designed by my daughter, was completely silhouetted. Both worked out great.

I learned something else during all this: The tradewinds were howling last night, and in previous years that would've blown out our candles. This year neither pumpkin had through-holes, except for the chimney hole at the top and two vent holes at the bottom so we could get an updraft through the pumpkin. Using pumpkins without through-holes meant the candles never had direct wind blowing on them, and consequently neither one blew out.

The kids were pleased as punch, and now I have a new tool to bring to bear on pumpkin carving next year. But first, I'd like to get some more Tornado bits!

Tom