Carving his niche

By Cristin Ross

January 12, 2009 12:38 pm

— Do you know what’s inside a golf ball?
Jacksonville resident Doyle Bodiford does. He can even tell you what colors a golf ball’s guts are. That’s because he’s been carving golf ball innards — which are actually compressed rubber — for some time.
“I saw another guy doing this on Texas Country Reporter once,” Bodiford said. “He was selling his carvings to pay for his traveling around the country.”
Bodiford, who works as the security guard at Jacksonville High School’s entry station, had been carving wood prior to seeing that show, and thought he’d try his hand at golf ball carving, too.
Some 200 sculptures later, he said he’s gotten to be a pretty good hand at it.
“I don’t plan out my carvings,” he admitted. “I just look at what I have to work with and go from there. The first one I did took me 12 hours to finish. Now they take me 45 minutes.”
The trickiest part, he said, is usually finding the seam of the outer covering of the ball.
“They all have a seam,” Bodiford said. “You just got to find it.”
Once he locates the seam, he takes a V-tool — like a miniature chisel whose blunt blade is shaped like a V — and commences to gouge the plastic coating at the seam, following it along the ball’s contour, until one hemisphere pops off.
The result is a ball of rubber nestled in half the outer shell.
“The interesting part is the rubber inside the balls comes in all different colors,” he said. “I never know what it’s going to be until I get the cover off. Every once in a while I’ll get an older ball that’s filled with rubber bands. That’s always a surprise — once I get that cover off, they go flying everywhere.”
He sometimes uses the half he’s removed as a base for the carving, but usually he makes his carvings into keychains, which he gives as gifts and uses himself.
One plus his hobby has over most others is expense.
“I’ve never bought a golf ball yet,” Bodiford said. “I find them out near Fred Douglass Elementary. There’s always some to be found over there.”
Since taking up carving golf balls, Bodiford said, it’s become like an obsession with him.
“Anytime I sit down, I have to have one in my hands,” he confessed with a laugh. “Problem is I can’t do it inside — it makes too big a mess. So I’ve been relegated to the front porch.”
Bodiford took up carving after he was injured in a fall from a communications tower a few years ago.
“I just had to have something to do,” he said. “I had a total 18 surgeries, and I was going crazy just sitting around. I started with the walking sticks with spirit faces carved into them.”
Bodiford’s still active with his wood carving projects, too. He’s currently making his neighbor a wooden walking stick with an antler grip.
“He comes out to his mailbox using an old hoe handle,” Bodiford said. “I thought I can do much better than that.”
He’s also expanded into carving deer horn as well. He’s produced numerous arrow heads, cross pendants and curly-cue keychains.
“I really can’t do this in the house,” he said. “When I get my Dremel after it, it starts to stink. My wife says no way.”
He likes carving the golf balls because they’re easier to shape.
“You don’t have to use really sharp tools,” he said. “In fact, you don’t want to at all, because you use a lot more force on a smaller, rounder surface. You slip off that ball with a sharp knife and get yourself instead, it’s bad news.”
The carvings he’s especially proud to have produced include Donald Duck and Goofy, Wacko from the Animaniacs cartoon, Slimer of Ghostbusters fame, Big Foot and a portrait of an alien from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
“I like to do silly monsters and creatures,” he said. “Anything with a lot of texture and features.”
Bodiford is planning to start a Web business with his carvings in the future.
His advice to the novice carver, whether they choose golf balls or something else, is “love what you’re doing.”
“If you’re not doing it for the enjoyment, then you’re wasting your time,” he said.

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