The folks at C.B. Fisk (http://www.cbfisk.com/) in Glouchester Mass were part of the team on the Craighead Saunders Organ that we carved the pipe shades for.  That project is here.

They contacted me to see if I could assist their scupltor, Morgan Faulds Pike in creating ten white oak capitals for a pipe organ they were building for Harvard University.  

Morgan  wanted me to glue up the blanks and "rough out" the capitals, then she would go over the entire surface with hand chisels to clean up the tool marks and give the hand carved surface finish. She sculpted a full size clay model of each of the two styles, I went out to C.B. Fisk and scanned the clay models, manipulated the files to get the correct number of faces for each capital (she had only finished one side of each style, and left the other sides and almost done, but lacking the details), and made the blanks and cut the capitals. As each one was finished, it was shipped to her for final work. The capitals are 18" across the points at the top of the capital. The rosettes were sacced separately and eventually eliminated from the design. The top molding of the capitals were drawn in the computer and merged with the clay model scan to get a perfect curve and a very smooth surface for that molding. Important to note is the that these capitals were carved in one piece after gluing up the blanks, a task that would normally require at least a 4 axis machine if not a 5 axis. But with some custom fixturing and the flexibility of the machine, there were carved on a 3 axis machine. As they say, "It's not the fiddle, but the fiddler that makes the dance!".