NORTH KINGSVILLE — Between his part-time job as an art teacher with Buckeye Local Schools, serving as a North Kingsville Village councilman and trustee for the Kingsville Library Board, and his family obligations, Dennis Kortyka still found 851 hours to “horse around” in his basement.

The product of those hours is a wooden horse, the fifth carousel animal Kortyka has carved since 1992, when he made one as a graduation present for his daughter, Dedre Trenn. Kortyka promised his daughter a horse when she was growing up, and when she graduated from the nursing program at Kent State University-Ashtabula, Kortyka made good on that promise with the gift.

nursing program at Kent State University-Ashtabula, Kortyka made good on that promise with the gift.

“The first one was to keep a promise that I’d get her a horse before she left home, but we could have a horse in North Kingsville,” he says. “After that, it just kind of took off.”

Kortyka made a lion for his son, Darrin, when he graduated from veterinary school. And, from 2003 to 2005, Kortyka worked on a wooden giraffe for his wife, Donna, and presented it to her as a 35th wedding anniversary gift.

After taking a hiatus, Kortyka once again picked up his carving tools last summer and set out to create a medieval horse adorned with armor. He started the process by doing hours of research on the Internet and carousel magazines. “Once I got an idea, I drew the horse,” he says.

The next step was to transfer that drawing onto a grid that would eventually be rendered life size and transferred to the wood. Originally, Kortyka planned a horse 63 inches long, but then he remembered it was being built in the basement and at some point would have to be carried up the steps and through a relatively small opening.

He scaled back his creation to 48 inches in length and 45 inches tall. Once he settled on the size, Kortyka transferred the design to blocks of basswood glued together in the rough form of the horse.

It took him 57 hours to complete the drawings. Eighty-three hours into the project, he was ready to start carving. But he chose, instead, to build the base first.

“This time I did the base first because when you get the figure done, it is anticlimactic to have to do the base,” he says.

Kortyka completed the body box for the figure on Aug. 8, 2008 and started roughing out the carving the next day. He took photographs of the project from that point on and displayed them at Pierpont Elementary, where he taught art last year. Back when he made his first figure, he did the work at Edgewood Senior High School, where students were able to view the progress while keeping the project a secret from his daughter.

“I think it is important (students) know I’m not just an art teacher,” Kortyka says.

He typically carved four to six hours a day, although he has done as many as nine hours. He says it simply becomes a matter of persistence and determination to get the job done.

In the process, he pretty much wore out two wooden mallets and broke in a third. The mallets strike the ends of the carving tools. “The idea is to wear them out rather than the chisels,” he says.

He used a variety of tools, including curved and V-shaped gouges and a simple utility knife, to carve the figure and the detailed armor.

There are 196 rivets on the figure. Each rivet took about five minutes to fashion from small wooden dowels; Kortyka had to file down the top of each pin to make it look like a rivet head.

The entire figure was hand sanded, and at times Kortyka’s fingers would bleed from the abrasion. Kortyka’s sweat and blood are literally in this work.

Thanks, in part, to having plenty of snow days in the recent school year, Kortyka had the work mounted on the pole and ready to paint after 715 hours of labor. On April 18, as Kortyka was moving the work to show his granddaughter the progress, the horse toppled over and its leg broke off.

The break, while discouraging, was not disastrous. Kortyka drilled the leg pieces, repaired it with dowel pins and reassessed his approach to mounting the horse. He then proceeded with the final stage, painting. He gave the figure four coats and often used a rag to impart a patina to the finish.

Kortyka named the horse “Tantus,” which means “great one” in Latin. He carved a “K” emblem into the side of the armor, and the symbol can be interpreted as standing for Kortyka, knight or the king’s horse.

The figure has joined his wife’s giraffe in the carousel room of their home. He says Tantus is for sale, but seriously doubts if he will be able to find a buyer willing to pay the kind of money that would compensate him for the 851 hours that went into Tantus’ making.

That’s the longest Kortyka has devoted to a carving, and yet he knows it will probably be topped by his next project, a horse reared up its back feet.

“God willing, I’ll do it,” Kortyka says.

However, after devoting so much time to Tantus, Kortyka has some serious catching up to do.

“Right now, I got a honey-do list big time because of this,” he says.