Some of the more common questions I get asked! If your question is not here, feel free to contact me instead.
How do I buy a wand?
Look through my designs and pick a wood you would like it made in! And if you want to go into more detail, read the section on finishes below. Then send me a message through the contact form. I'll get it made for you, send you a picture, and if you give it a thumbs up then I will send you a paypal invoice for payment.
Cost per wand is between £50 to £105 inc postage, depending on the wood, amount of wood used and the complexity of the design. Most are £50 to £75, but some like the Elder wand or V's are more time consuming and costly. However, if you are tight for money then I do have a box of 2nd quality wands - that is, wands that had a problem during the carving process, perhaps they came out bent, or there was a crack in the wood, that sort of thing. I could finish one of these up for you and post it up for £35, though quality would be lower. Get in touch for what I have available.
What woods do can you use?
This is my current list, at time of writing, though it is often changing!
Gabon ebony, brown ebony, African blackwood, beech, bubinga, box, bocote, cherry, East Indian rosewood, hawthorne, Honduran rosewood, hornbeam, padauk, katalox, jatoba, lacewood, lignum vitae, padauk, purpleheart, oak, olive, utile, walnut, wenge, wild plum, yew, and zebrano
However, many of these come with caveats, like tendency to bend when being carved, or not thick enough for certain designs, etc. I can source other woods if necessary.
How do you make these wands with such detail?!
All wands are carved on one of my two home made CNC machines! These are computer controlled machines that carve them for me, taking anything from 1 hour for the absolute simplest wands, up to 5 or 6 hours for more complex designs. Everything about this process was incredibly challenging to figure out, wands have to be the most difficult thing it is possible to make in wood, but the end result is that I can make designs that you cannot practically be make by hand.
New designs start life as a 3d model, which I create using a variety of programs from engineering CAD (Computer Aided Design) software, to sculpting in VR (like working with digital clay). I then have to figure out the carving process with the aid of CAM (Computer Aided Design) tools, each full carving program is itself a collection of 30+ smaller programs stringed together, and can be millions of lines long - with each line representing a specific location that the cutting head moves through. Finalising the carving program often involves multiple iterations and test runs until I am happy with the process, and is typically an ongoing process over months if not years to optimise and fix any problems that may come up. Every wand is different in how it has to be carved, and sometimes problems will only reveal themselves with particular woods, since they all have their own carving characteristics. The machines are also an ongoing project - some parts are on perhaps their 10th design iteration, and things still sometimes break!! The first machine was a more standard 3 axis router, which I designed additional equipment to "bolt on" to make wands. However, this had it's limitations, and so the second machine I designed from the ground as a full 6 axis mill / turn purely to make wands. It is extremely complex! I use high end servo motors to control most the axis, these are not simple "servo arms" but full industrial automation grade motors with 24 bit optical encoders on them. That is, the encoder measures the rotational position of the motor, so it knows where the motor shaft is at all times, and 24 bit means over 16 millions "sensing positions" per revolution. Absolutely overkill, but also fun!!
After the wands are carved, they are of course not complete, and take time to sand and clean up. And then they are finished....
What finish do you use?
All my wands are finished using vacuum impregnation with my own blend of hard wax oil. The wands are placed into a "finishing column", made of borosilicate glass, submerged in the finish, and then all the air is sucked out the chamber, which pulls air out the wood, and then when returned to atmospheric pressure the finish is sucked back in. More specifically, I use a cyclic process in which the chamber goes from vacuum to atmosphere about 5 times over 30 minutes, which helps get through the surface skin barrier to drive finish in deeper, providing maximum possible protection. Wands are then removed, allowed to drip off excess, before I wipe them down and place them under a fan to let the finish harden.
The finish itself is a hard wax blend of my own, the hard wax bit refers to tiny micronised wax particles (ideally <10um, that is 10% the width of a human hair), that then protrude slightly on the surface of the finish when it dries, and are rubbed by hands when picked up, forming a kind of self-replenishing wax barrier on the surface of the wand. Sadly, it turns out micronised waxes are enormously difficult to buy in small quantities - some companies that claim to sell "hard wax" oils cheat, they literally use micronised plastic like PTFE particles instead, yuk - so as is often the case, I was force to make it myself! I settled on a process called "antisolvent precipitation" - dissolve the wax (carnauba and rice bran) into a hot solvent, and then slowly drip it into a cool jar of acetone which is being "whisked" at high speed (high shear), causing the wax to precipitate out. The acetone and toluene are then part evaporated under vacuum, before being added to the finishing mix, which is part varnish and part a high wetting / high saturation oil, designed by the manufacturer for maximum penetration into wood (OH group bonding).
In general, for wood finishes there is always something of a trade off between the most natural hand feel, and the most protection. The absolute best protection for wood, is to coat it in epoxy resin and then a layer of UV protecting varnish over the top of that - as they do with wooden yachts. However, as you might imagine, this is not optimal for wands! The weakest protection, is simply to wipe them in mineral or even olive oil. For some woods, the latter can be sufficient - ebonies or lignum vitae, though simple oil will rarely give a full shiny burnished look, not without colossal effort. But for less dense woods, such an approach is inappropriate, as when the wands get wet (just from sweat etc), water will penetrate into the hydrophilic structure of the wood, causing it to swell and "raise grain", i.e. become furry to the touch. And so, all woodworkers have to decide where to place themselves on this spectrum. To a degree, the vacuum process gives me some of the best of both worlds. I get the benefit of a penetrating, non film forming oil, in that the finish goes into the wood itself, without forming a skin on top - you are touching the wood. But also the much higher degree of water resistance that only vacuum processes can provide.
Can you make custom wands?
Unfortunately, if you mean whether I can take a design or concept you have, and turn it into a wand for you, the answer is mostly no. I can easily take one of my existing designs and carve it in your choice of wood, but entirely new designs are much more challenging. This is because my processes are great at reproducing the same design, once I have it complete, but there is a massive amount of work up front in creating a new design. For some, such as Professor Snapes wand, it took literally weeks of work, plus countless small production tweaks as I figured out the best methods to carve the peculiarities of the design. Obviously, even if I had time spare this would be way too costly to make as a one off design. That said, if you have a simple design, and I have spare time (unlikely!), I might be able to help, but chances are honestly still low. And by simple, I mean circularly symmetric, such as turned on a lathe, or with only small and easily 3d modelled details. There is also the problem that it is risky for me - I have had people walk away and refuse to pay, it is rare but happens. All that said, I may be able to do a simple design for something around £150 upwards, but at that point it might be better to contact someone who makes wands entirely by hand, such a Sam for Jonkers Wands, or Danny from Nebulus Wands if you can talk him into it!
