Interested in working with and learning from other hand tool woodworkers in Northern Colorado? So am I, and I’m tired of slowly bumping into people locally as luck will permit.  This is the modern age, the internet has made everything closer, and knowledge is just a click away. But it still remains that humans learn best from watching the successes and failures of other humans, not from staring at flickering images on a screen.

So lets get together and learn!

I propose we meet in voluntary association, bi-monthly on the first and third Saturdays, at a mutually agreeable location central to Fort Collins, CO, to plane together, chisel together, saw together, and learn again what quality construction means, through the study of classical Japanese timber joinery.

At each meeting a new joint will be chosen, to be practiced and studied during the week and cut during the get-together, probably for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Hand tools of the human powered variety only for cutting the joints, and you supply your own practice lumber. Common construction 4×4 will usually do.

Depending upon the number of participants and the skill level, instruction will annually culminate in a design project and structure build from locally sourced timber, to practice what has been learned.

What is happening in Colorado? I see grid after grid of new housing development slowly bulldozing its way across the front range. And what do you get for $500,000? The same quality of construction for a mobile home, merely a larger box with more expensive veneers.

The tools you will need (or their western equivalents):

A couple of hammers, a couple of hand planes, some chisels, 240mm ryoba saw and dozuki saw, some sharpening stones, brace and various bits, layout tools including carpenters square (sashigane), bevel gauge, marking gauge, marking pen and knife, try square, and optionally, ink line.

Additionally, a planing board (pictured), cushion, and saw horses, or a planing beam, perhaps a few clamps.

 This is me, Gabe, who you will be learning with.

This is the text: https://fabiap.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/wood-joints-in-classical-japanese-architecture.pdf

Blogs for study:

Chris Hall’s “The Carpentry Way”

Mathieu’s “Fabula Lignarius”

The idea for a local group developed as the direct result of the efforts of Sebastian Gonzalez’s Project Mayhem 2.0

Additionally there is a timber-framing school in the mountains west of Fort Collins, though I have yet to attend: Rocky Mountain Workshops

Interested? Of course you are! Its free, although people will probably appreciate you more if you bring some cold beer.

Interested, but don’t have any skill? You’ll still need the tools, but I’ll be happy to instruct in the basics of dimensioning stock with hand planes, sharpening, marking, and posture of the saw, which can be worked on in lieu of cutting a beautiful and complicated joint.

Don’t wait another week, contact me through the comments section below or my email, grdwiggins@gmail.com

I’ve been reading Azby Brown’s “Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan”, and one of the nice little illustrations show a Japanese wash basin for scrubbing dishes with half-dovetail joinery on the sides. Water tight joinery is one of those absolute standards of quality, the acid test for accurate work in some respects, especially if it can hold water right away.

So I wanted to try it! Unfortunately there’s no way to assemble a water tight box with sliding dovetails on the sides and a rabbeted bottom housed in a groove. Somewhere I ran across a technique, quite ingenious, allowing for a nailed bottom. Unfortunately, as you’ll see, some of the minor details became a major problem.

This technique involves hammering a wire into the bottom edges of the side pieces, and then planing them down to the level of the crushed fiber. When the wood swells from the water the compressed fibers expand back out and seal against the bottom.

Never having seen the technique in action I became a little over enthusiastic with the gauge of the wire that I used. These are the sides after planing out most of the impression left by the wire.

I love the sliding dovetail. There are joinery planes that make cutting this joint much easier, but I don’t own any, so it is simply a matter of saw and chisel. Seems to work quite well for these smaller sliding dovetails. I would have a problem if the dovetail was longer than my chisel can pare when cleaning the waste from the groove.

Nailed on the bottom. I actually enjoy using nails. Pneumatic fasteners have made the old nail and hammer feel down right quaint. The wood for this little box came from the pallets the materials for the greenhouse I’m building were delivered on, some kind of soft maple. I’m not sure about that though, because the stuff is abrasive on my tool edges. I used this same scrap for practicing some dovetails and it was almost impossible to chop the end grain without massive tearing. I wet the end grain with a little water and it pared smooth as butter.

I filled it with water and Darla gave her approval. If you’re looking for a use for water tight wooden vessels how about a dog’s watering bowl? It’s usually kept full, so no problem with the wet/dry cycle that would ruin the joinery.

Eventually my mistakes became apparent. The compressed wood fiber along the bottom swelled forcefully enough to open a gap along the bottom. It looks bad, but actually was still holding water. Not for long…

Eventually the sides swelled enough to blow the joinery apart, where upon it began to leak pretty badly. Isn’t that the opposite of what’s supposed to happen, it leaks at first and then seals as it swells? I’d like to try this again with flat grain lumber. I think using pieces with close to vertical grain concentrated the expansion in a direction detrimental to the joinery. I need to leave more relish on the ends of the sides beyond the dovetail to resist the shear forces the swelling produces. Obviously I also can use a much finer wire, maybe two side by side for a double gasket effect.

I think I see more sliding dovetails in my future.

I finally decided to try a whole systems approach to working with the kanna and nokogiri. My planing beam is angled, my saw horses are low, and my butt stays cool on the ground. I love how much space I just opened up, the floor is much  more visible.  Now, I’m not sayin I’ll never get to making a western style bench, but the possibilities of the tategu’s work space must be explored if I want to really understand the efficiencies to be gained .

At the moment most of my hand tools are hanging or sitting on my pair of trestles, but they’ll soon be moved as well. With my tools in an honest to god tool box or hanging on the wall I’ll once again have use of the trestles and the space for a couple of planing  beams that will allow others to work in the more traditional standing bench fashion.

Now it is live or die when it comes to cutting while bent over at some odd angle. It is frustrating and difficult at times to limit myself in this way, but in the end will be liberating to have the skill not to need a bench vise.

Haha, this f**king fly. You know, there’s always something trying to distract you. Hopefully you don’t swat at the flies that land on you with your hand still holding a bench chisel, I’ve done that.  This insolent little insect posed for a couple of photographs before I got back to work. Speed in craft is more about working in a very focused manner than merely moving about quickly. Something is always trying to ruin your ability to stay calm enough to concentrate, this fly personifies that very well. Stopping to take a picture of the thing that’s distracting you? Evidently I’m hopeless, but perhaps you can commiserate.

Oh, right! I’m supposed to be writing a post about the fuigo joinery…Ok! I finished the sides, more cross-grain dado and routering.

This is about the most complicated bit of joinery on the whole thing.

For the little flapper valve covers I marked the dimensions of the opening it covers so that it could be used as a template for marking the holes on the sides.

The flapper hinges across the string holes by tapering the end. I wasn’t sure just how much to allow them to hinge, but its something that’s easy to change if it feels like there’s too much resistance to the movement of air.

The battens that form the feet on the bottom were screwed on from the bottom. For the top I secured them with screws from the beneath to keep things looking nice. Both the bottom and top pieces had warped a little and these battens will go a long way towards keeping things flat. Perhaps if I build another they can be attached with sliding dovetails.

The alignment of a lot of my joinery was not so great, necessitating quite a bit of fitting to get things to line up properly. For some reason it didn’t occur to me to make a story stick for the critical dimensions lengthwise or across the short edge. With shoji work it is really straight forward to mark pieces together all at once, or to use a frame piece to mark the associated kumiko. With wider paneling it doesn’t make sense to mark them together, but a story stick will keep you from measuring twice and marking slightly different each time. My biggest error presented on the thin side panels, where I used my sashigane to square the edges. I failed to check that the length was the same top and bottom, and the top edge ended up being a bit too long for a good fit. Good lesson to learn, I simply don’t have enough experience with tansu.

As a result, when it came time to put the top on, it didn’t fit! I had to widen the groove in the top that houses one of the short edges by about 1/32″. It will leave a gap on the inside, the gods of joinery will mock me .

None the less it is starting to take shape! I can’t believe I thought this thing might be too small at 36″ long. At this point I’m ready to cut the glass that sits across the bottom and start thinking about what I want to use as gasket material for the piston head. Its exciting when you finally get to put the stack of carefully cut parts together, it has presence and life. I can already imagine using it, the gentle woosh and click of the valves.

The lesson today was definitely to use a story stick, every time, all the time, whenever you can. It doesn’t matter what the hell the measurements are so long as they are consistent.

Peter, who stopped by last weekend, was kind enough to let me photograph a set of old Japanese chisels he had picked up on etsy. This set is quite characteristic of some of the great deals to be had. I forgot to ask what the cost was, but it was probably close to the cost if you bought new only the 48mm chisel on the left.

I really love to see the worn down chisels. You look at that and think, don’t you want to have a bit more registration surface on the back of your chisel when paring? I suppose by the time you ware that much steel off in sharpening, you don’t need the large flat, you can just pare flat.

I made the layout for this joint to show my guest Peter, it not being strictly part of project mayhem. It sat there looking at me in such a compelling fashion that I had to go ahead and give it a try. My first oblique splice, among the many variations of this joint that exist!

Because both halves of the joint are very similar they are divided into the upper wood and the lower wood. I’m finally starting to realize how the sashigane speeds up layout. I’ve been using 1/2″ as a sort of nominal gauge for a lot of the haunching and, in this case, rabbeting marks. The sashigane being 15mm wide, it is used for the same purpose, but directly, so no measurement is required, you simple use the tongue of the square as the reference.  I recently ordered “The Complete Japanese Joinery” and am hopeful that it can give more insight into these time and accuracy saving uses of the sashigane.

Before I begin describing the cut sequence, a note. Cutting a joint like this where the two haves are almost the same is great practice! What I quite obviously did wrong for the first half was corrected, and the second half actually gave me the chance to apply my new found knowledge.

I started the first half with the rip into the main cheeks of the scarf. I started the cut with the saw vertical, and then rotated the timber so that I could saw along in horizontal fashion. Its definitely a new skill to turn the saw on its side. I seem to let the top of the plate rest on the bottom of the kerf, producing a cut that slants upward away from the line. Its difficult without more experience to get a feel for the saw in the cut. If you stand up too much you’re bending the saw and things go awry, kind of like swinging a golf club.

I stopped the rip cut when I realized I hadn’t thought through where I was going, and cut the shoulder line so that the rip had somewhere to meet up with.

Paring such a large flat surface was difficult! Too much time spent carefully checking with a straight edge, and very easy to gouge in and remove too much material. The surface quality of my cheek suffered as a result.

I marked the taper that draws the two halves of the joint together in assembly and made a series of waste cuts to the line for the lower cheek, which were then chopped with a chisel.

Don’t you just hate it when you’re paring across the grain on a cheek and blow off part of the line? The line is all you have.

In any case, the cheeks were pared flush and the layout finished for the through pegs that lock the joint. Evidently the square peg gives you the option of using a double wedge to lock the joint and tighten incrementally.

The housing for the rabbeted tongue on the tip of the scarf was chopped last, after sawing to the line on both sides.

For the second half of the joint I wised up, starting the cut with the rabbeted nose so that I had full support while paring the surfaces. For the cheeks I started with the shoulder cut and repeated my horizontal rip to the shoulder, and then immediately made the series of waste cross-cuts that allow the waste to be chiseled out for the lower cheek. Now there is room to plane the top cheek surface with a kanna, incomparably easier than paring. At the size of these joints you’re basically paring the face of a small board, the kanna makes sense.

I took the fence off of my skewed rabbet plane to pare the lower cheek. I’ve never used this plane to pare such a large surface, it was awesome and fast.

The first fitting of the joint was really disappointing. I know from previous experience that I could pound on this joint all day long with a sledge hammer and it would never come together. Bring the hammer out for the last 1/16″ or so of fit and not before, its better than waiting for rainbow farting unicorns to descend and push the joint together.

I spent a bit of time looking at the joint, trying to figure out what surface was proud. It must have been a small error in measurement, my sashigane technique. That is, marking one side of the scarf slightly longer than the other. I had to pare down the rabbeted nose on the left in the photo, as well as the shoulder that forms it, by almost 1/16″ before the two halves met nicely. I just don’t imagine having the luxury of repeatedly trial fitting a joint like this if the scarf was connecting two large, long, and heavy ass beams.

I already had some cherry scrap planed to 1/2″ square, so that’s what was used for the draw pin. Because of how the joint slides together, I would think that trying to use the draw pins to force in the last little bit of fit could lead to splitting along the cheeks of the mortise walls.

The first meetup for the new local Japanese carpentry group will be next weekend. I’ve been surprised at the level of interest in such a short period of time, it will be an awesome experience to work together for the first time, figure out what can be accomplished when we learn together, even if just to drink a beer and joke about our mistakes. I had in mind that this joint, or a variation thereof, would be the work of the day and I encourage anyone to step up to the challenge. If you don’t have a little bit of an ‘oh shit’ moment when you first look at the joint, then you probably need to practice something more complicated.

I dediced to take a break from the fuigo build to make a hikouki kanna. Actually what happened was that I’ve become really tired of the intense morning light that shines through my shop windows. I want to make a set of screens to cover the windows, but had told myself I wouldn’t do any more shoji work before making this tool, used to accurately plane thin strips of wood to thickness.

Odate refers to it as Kumiko-Kezuri-Kanna, and there are western examples as well, but if you’re looking to buy one online its ‘hikouki’ kanna. Just a touch expensive.

“Hikouki Kanna” By Inomoto

Des King references it as well: Hikoki Kanna, although as he mentions in his book on shoji, he thicknesses kumiko with a bench top drum sander before a final finish planing. I suppose that’s both fast and accurate, but I’m not yet at the point of needing such a machine.

This is what I started with to thickness kumiko. Its a very cheap 50mm kanna from Tools From Japan with home made runners on the bottom that determine the finished thickness. Its a small plane, so I can only work one piece at a time.

The problem with that is wood moves.  When you cut thin strips, they’re going to warp a little. This is a picture of some 1/4″ Hemlock kumiko, the worst warping off the saw that I’ve ever seen. It was a shame too because the board had such nice tight grain.  When you go to plane warped material to thickess it wants to flex up off the planing beam and push into the cutting edge, even when the depth has been reached on the bottom runners. The result is a lack of dimensional control. I’ve resorted to finish planing each piece with a dial caliper to check in several places along the length of the piece being worked. With care and attention its possible to keep things within a few thousandths of an inch, but terrible slow and tedious.

Consider that Odate relates how his master could plane kumiko to thickness by touch alone. Obviously I have much to learn, but in the mean time there is a better faster way.

Cut the dai. I’ve blogged about the process in an earlier post, Making a Dai. For this second dai I used ink on layout, and added a center line to the bottom and top of the block. It measure 11″ in length, and was built to fit the one large blade that I own, and change among various dai. I’m really getting my money from this blade!

I also used a center drill to start the holes that house the sub-blade holding pin, no worries of drifting off the mark like last time. Placing this hole still feels iffy to me, thankfully the sub-blade has a forgiving amount of flex to it.

The magic of the hikouki kanna centers around a small spring loaded bamboo bar that pushes the kumiko flat in front of the mouth of the plane, insuring it lies flat to the planing beam. To help hold it in there it sits in a sliding dovetail cut into the dai. I’m a big fan of using wooden cut fences for starting dozuki cuts. Here’s a simple one made out of some kind of nice tropical hardwood cut for a thick veneer. There’s a lot of work where you won’t have space to use a cut fence like this, in which case a scrap piece of kumiko works great. I just give it a little lick to help it stick to the wood while I’m starting the cut, haha. Even though the cut will be angled to match the sides of the dovetail I start the kerf perpendicular with a few strokes. I also used my rip tooth dozuki, even though this is cross-grain, because the teeth are less liable to catch and break off in this oak.

With a clean straight kerf started the saw is angled to match the dovetail, same as with a jiguchi rail extension cut. I also cut down the center of the dovetail so that the waste is easier to clear out with chisel.

A nice clean sliding dovetail, ready for the spring mortise. Notice I still haven’t cut the mouth open wide enough to let a shaving pass through. I wait to do that until the blade is bedded.

As for flat spring stock, you can buy it I pretty much any size or thickness and then temper it yourself. As it is saw plate has close to the right temper for a spring. A good Japanese saw might be too hard to work without breaking from the fatigue, stick to the softer cheap plates that are closer to a purple temper, they’ll probably last longer.

I settled on a thinner spring from a disposable ryoba blade. I have no analytics as far as the required force for the spring. The drawing in Odate’s tool book shows an adjustable tension mechanism with screw adjustment. I can see how that’s useful if you’re planing a wide range of thicknesses. The simpler way is to just bend the spring until it has enough bow to give good tension. I also peened it a bit on the anvil to set the curve and stiffen it up. I used to work as a musical instrument repair technician, flutes to be specific, which use a lot of very small flat springs and wire springs (I’ve been told I have a talent for small exacting work). Seriously, you just bend it to change the tension.

I cut a mortise in the bottom of the sliding dovetail to house the spring.

Small parts require tweezers. If nothing else you gotta have a good pair on hand to pull all the splinters you get out being a woodworker.  The mortise for the spring has to be deep enough that it gives it full housing when the bamboo bar is depressed. So, I can’t say how deep to make the mortise, that depends on how you bend your spring.

My bamboo bar, from pre-finished bamboo flooring. Somebody send me some fresh bamboo! This stuff sucks for making sumisashi. I planed it to fit, and then made it loose enough that about 1/16″ sticks out proud of the sole. It needs to be planed down in thickness as well, such that it can be pressed slightly below the sole of the dai.

Here’s my smoothing plane for comparison. Really the closest I could make to a copy, but with American red oak and not Japanese white oak. The next time I make a dai I’ll try hickory.

The runners on the bottom need small recesses cut to let the bamboo bar stick out. I also cut a little notch to keep the blade edge from pushing out the runners.

I tried it on a few pieces of practice kumiko and it held tolerances of four thousands of an inch, right on the money for good joinery. If I flatten my planing beam again it might do even better. This plane is also wide enough to handle two pieces of kumiko at once. It represents at least a four fold increase in the speed with which I can dimension material, awesome!

The first meeting of the little Japanese Daiku study group I formed was great! I’m late to writing of it because of the greenhouse, almost finished, so close.  That and every once in a while its healthy to take a break from the computer and let your vision drift to the far away.

Thanks to Peter and Eric who were in attendance we had a lot to discuss, starting with Peter’s excellent set of sharpening stones. Unfortunately I can’t remember the names, perhaps naniwa for the colored ones? They were softer than my Shapton ceramic/glass, and very fast. With the addition of a nagura stone the slurry gave a beautiful polish for the grit range.

This is a great example of how woodworkers immediately benefit from getting together. No woodworker can afford to buy a bunch of same grit stones to compare, so naturally the sharpening stones are the first thing of interest when woodworkers meet, regardless of place or time.

Eric brought an excellent set of honing films, which cut more slowly than the water stones/ but left a very bright clean polish. If you’re looking at what to get for sharpening, something between the cheapness of sandpaper and the healthy expense of a set of natural stones, it is honing film. Works great, seems to be holding up okay for Eric, and is available in a nice range of grits and very moderate costs.

The beauty of the day? A large natural stone, comparable to 1000/3000 grit range. Didn’t work on it too much because it didn’t have enough soak time when we first started. It felt very coarse in use, but the polish had character, very nice stone!

Somehow aviator sunglasses and sharpening stones look cool together, notice the concentrated but relaxed look on Peter’s face, perfect attitude for sharpening.

As part of re-organizing the shop to make room for more people I put together this bench set-up. I locked my trestles together with a diagonal brace on either side, the beams are 4×6 screwed to the trestle  with a couple smaller boards thrown across the middle to put tools on. Pretty solid in use too. The 4x6x8′ are about $16 dollars a piece, something like that, so this is a very affordable setup, and easy to keep the beams flat. I was a little worried that having two people pounding on it at the same time may make it difficult to work, but it really wasn’t a problem. Haha, Sebastian advised me not to make it too nice, hopefully this is okay.

Peter had to take off after the sharpening stone shoot-out to prepare curriculum for the start of classes at CSU. The city of Fort Collins is repopulated with young eager minds, ready to throw a party.

Anyway…Eric and I got started with the layout for stepped dovetail splice.

This is the first time that I used a level in combination with my center lining. In this case I really only cared about the flatness of the top face, and after leveling that top face, dropped a vertical line across the end grain with a level. The implication is that perpendicular marks across the top for the joinery layout are marked out square from the center line, not the edge of the timber. I’m still learning the potential of this center rule method, its a very powerful technique.

Eric got right to work after layout, showing a natural speed that had me concentrating to keep up. So cool to work together, always watching out the corner of your eye for some new technique, like the apprentices of old.

This is a good example, body position relative to the chisel locked together by connecting the hand with the chin, paring an end grain surface.

The joinery came out well for me, and we learned a lot finding the hiding surface that was proud in Eric’s joint while drinking some refreshing iced white tea.  Even though the timber was uneven, the center lines came together nicely.

The next meetup has been scheduled, I look forward to it greatly. It is these personal connections that lead to real growth in our craft.

Cutting wedged mortise and tenon/ box joinery.

Saturday, Sep 5, 2015, 12:00 PM

Location details are available to members only.

2 Members Attending

The first meetup of the Japanese Daiku study group was a blast! Let’s continue on with the exploration of classical Japanese timber joints, to cut the wedged mortise and tenon. All of the basics of good joinery are included, accurate preparation of the lumber, center line layout technique, use of the saw and chisel.What tools should you bring? Goo…

Check out this Meetup →

Welcome back! I’m working again on the fuigo, a traditional Japanese wooden bellows.  They’re quite simple in design, but not commonly made by skilled woodworkers here in America, usually by blacksmiths and aspiring swordsmiths, so the joinery element can be a bit undeveloped. Don’t fear the joinery, its a question of durability, not just aesthetics. Its occurred to me more than once during this build how powerful a tool is the hand plane, kanna, that it can handle such large and wide material at such a moderate cost. I’m looking at planer/joiners right now and its not even worth my money to get a joiner smaller than eight inches. Because of my hand planes, I can afford to wait for the right beast of a machine to come my way. Who knows if it ever will?

The photo above is the tuyere bearing block with its hole cut, being used to mark the hole in the birdhouse side. I had meant for the tuyere bearing block to be a bit wider, but there was an error in my plans concerning the internal width of the piston box. I cut both the piston rod bearing block and the tuyere bearing block from the same length of stock, and had to switch them around to have a usable piece of wood after cutting the piston rod bearing block too short.

If I was being super traditional about every detail I would be nailing these two pieces together. As it is, I find screws to be friendlier to the next person who’ll have to work on this. To keep the outside of the fuigo looking clean and unencumbered by a bunch of screws I hid as much as possible on the inside face.

The piston rod bearing block was next. I clamped the block in position on the side. Previously I bored a pilot hole in the side where I wanted the piston rod to come through.

With the proper position maintained by the clamps the side was removed and drilled from the back for screws to attach the bearing block. I also drilled through my piston rod locating hole so that it marked the bearing block.

Boxwood anyone? This stuff is very dense, one of the better bearing woods after ironwood. I cut myself a small piece to inlay into the bearing block.

Working on small pieces at the planing board can get difficult because there is not enough room to place your foot directly on the piece. I had to use my heal to hold it against the planing stop. This is probably the widest mortise I’ve ever chopped, full width of my 48mm chisel. I cleaned to depth with my router plane, though it was a little large for the blade to work in such a small space.

With the mortise cut I used my shooting board to trim the boxwood bearing to a perfect snug fit against the end grain. Hopefully when this bearing shows too much wear, probably after I’m dead, the next guy will be able to pop the old bearing  out without any trouble and source a replacement.

With the bearing installed I re-mounted the bearing block and centered the whole affair on the drill press table for a 1″ hole with a forstner bit. It is really, really important that you get a good straight hole here, so that the piston rod won’t jam and you maintain as tight a fit about the bearing as possible to minimize air leakage.

And here it is, the finished bearing, cool! I had considered using a piece of steel pipe, or copper, brass, whatever. Compared to buying a brass bearing the nine dollars I paid for my little chunk of boxwood will make a LOT of different bearings. I’ve used wooden bearings on bobbin winders, spinning wheels, they’re awesome.

With the bearing blocks finished I took apart most of the fuigo and installed the glass across the bottom and the piston stops. Notice the length of the piece of glass relative to the length of the fuigo. For a while I wondered why you would sacrifice the length of internal displacement and put a shorter length of glass in the fuigo than it could handle. The reason has to do with the piston rod bearing, and the tolerances that you can achieve. Just as with a spinning wheel’s bearings for the wheel, you want your bearing points to be as far apart as possible. By using a shorter length of glass and placing it as far toward the back as possible you insure that the bearing rod is less likely to bind in the fully pulled back position.

Installed the flapper valves. This thing is starting to look like a proper machine!

I reassembled the sides and found a stupid error. When I originally installed the birdhouse side to mark the  bevel on its top edge I tapped it in with a block and hammer. What I didn’t realize was that the tapping with a hammer caused the sides to pop up a little bit. Thus the birdhouse side was made too wide. I had to go back and plane it down, definitely an error I’ve learned from about assembling cabinetry. The birdhouse side was just a tight fit, to get it back out I had to tap on the bottom board like backing out a plane iron

In any case it was an easy mistake to fix, and I soon had the birdhouse top installed with some screws through the face.

I finished the fuigo up yesterday, this post is just getting too long to show it all at once. I don’t have a tuyere pipe yet, I’ll definitely need to shoot some video of this thing breathing life to a fire once I get it set up. Stay tuned!

Oh, Sebastian just posted some drawings by Mark Grable for an Open Source Forge. Really beautiful work Mark, inspiring and at just the right time, thank you.

Sometimes I forget to show things that I think are too commonly understood, but the humble shooting board deserves a mention. When I first read of this tool in one of Tom Fidgen’s books it was like a revelation. Seriously, how does one get on in the shop without a shooting board? I’m still using my push style board on top of my planing beam because its already been made, no need to waste this one just to be pulling a plane across the work. And this little low angle block plane with adjustable mouth is exceptionally effective at end grain work. Here I’m trimming the piston head board to length.

I use the wedge from my shoulder plane as a template whenever I’m cutting mortises that will be wedged. For some reason I felt like laying this out with ink, sometimes the ink is more comfortable because its so easy to see, though a little less accurate than knife lines in theory. In practice the more accurate line to work to is the one that you can actually see clearly. I’ve taken to moving around a small work light just to get things properly lit in the shop on days when the daylight is missing.

After mortising the piston head board I roughed down the handle to a cylinder and drilled the hole for the piston rod tenon.  The handle has to be made first so that the tenon can be fitted properly at the lathe. I decided to make the hole blind, part of the clean look of the fuigo.

I struggle to make forms that are not ugly at the lathe. If you asked me what looks good in terms of curve and form I couldn’t tell you. Its much easier to say something is ugly and keep removing wood until it looks good, that’s generally my approach. I may have looked at half a dozen pictures of fuigo with these handles, but you don’t really see the form until you make one for yourself.

The piston rod, having previously been squared and cut to length, was mounted with a two jaw chuck. When I was drawing the plans for the fuigo, this is one of the design constraints for total length of the box. This lathe may suck but it does have some decent bed length.

The chuck is holding the wedged tenon end, with the handle end against the tail stock so that its easy to check the tenon fit on the handle without unmounting from the lathe. After roughing down to a cylinder I used my parting tool and caliper to cut down to 1″ diameter along the length of the cylinder.

The cut that defines the shoulder between the square cross section and the cylinder is a good example of the different quality of cut between the parting chisel and skew chisel. Basically the difference between cross-cut and rip-cut.  The tip of the skew chisel, although it makes me nervous to make this cut, gives a beautiful clean end grain cut without tear out.

The skew chisel, with hand as steady rest, was also indispensable for smoothing down the cylinder to final dimension. I made a gauge block for the bearing ID so that I could check the piston rod without dismounting from the lathe. The final bit of fit was brought in with 220 grit sandpaper, so that the bearing gauge ran smoothly over the piston rod.

With the lathe work done I cut the tenon and marked for the wedge that secures the face of the piston head board. I used the tenon cheek cut-off to support the tenon as I mortised.

Mortise cut, tenon chamfered, looking good.

I had a little scrap of walnut that was the right width for the 1/2″ wedges, so it makes some nice contrast, though you’ll never see it in use. The piston head board was from flat sawn stock, so it cupped a little. I placed the concave face on the side opposite the wedges, just seemed to make sense like that. Eventually the handle will be drilled for a cross-pin, but I don’t want to do that until the piston is fitted to the fuigo because the handle has to be off to take the rod out of the box. I also shortened the piston rod by 1/2″ from the plans so that it would actually fit in the box. As you can probably imagine, the piston rod and head board have to be wedged after assembly while inside the fuigo.

I would love to find some kind of fur to use as the gasket material, fur is probably the better material because of its natural slickness and fuzziness. As it is I really want to get this thing working, and I can always replace a thin gasket with a thicker one later. With a pair of calipers I measured this towel to be 1/16″ at full compression, 3/32″ in use. So each side of the piston head board was reduced 3/32″, with the exception of the bottom which I only reduced 1/16″ because the gasket material will compress more under the weight of the head board.

The fit turned out to be quite good with the clearances I guessed for the gasket material, perhaps a little tight top to bottom, but I’m going to see if that changes with a bit of use once the piston is “run in” a bit. All of the internal wooden surfaces in contact with the piston head received two coats of paste finishing wax to make the action nice and smooth. Even as careful as I was with drilling the piston rod bearing and dimensioning the piston rod I still had a little binding towards the back of the stroke (when the rod is pulled out all the way). I could have adjusted the bearing, but in this case just hand sanded the bearing rod until it ran smoothly along its length. I finished the piston rod with a coat of paste wax as well. The lid is simply held on with a snug fit, I didn’t see the need for fasteners.

And here it is, ready to breath life to a forge. It feels a bit tight, but I’ll wait to make adjustments until I use it a bit. I still need to pin the handle to the rod, but its tight enough at the moment that I’ll wait. It pushes some serious air! I am deeply satisfied with how this project turned out, I totally disregarded the length of time it took to complete. Now, looking at the finished object, it still amazes me that I have one of these, I almost don’t believe that it works so well.

If you’re into these fuigo you’ve probably read about the gentle woosh of air, the calming click of the valves. The only thing I can compare it to is the meditative quality of shishi-odoshi used in Japanese gardens.  This bellows is the quality of a professional tool, part of me knows I’ve made something too good for me, I aspire to be worth using it.

Next comes making a charcoal kiln for proper softwood charcoal. And perhaps, if my vision stays clear enough and I can train enough carpenters, a small building to house the forge, like Mark has imagined here.

You can probably surmise a good deal about my personality based on the fact that I love to saw so much. Functionally I have a high tolerance for stuff others might perceive as tedious. Its not because I’m a patient man, its just a matter of love and concentration.

One of the gentlemen that joined the daiku meetup group I started happens to be a Japanese Tea Ceremony practitioner, and has built several tea rooms in Colorado, but lacks the hand  tools to study the joinery aspect of the craft. Buying tools…it happens in fits does it not? I found myself red eyed last night looking at Yahoo Japan auctions. The prices make you feel like, buy now! And then you remember the shipping and service fee, bummer.

Yesterday I did a hard quench test on some of the saw plate I’ve been working with over the past couple months, and it hardened quite successfully with water. I polished and drew the temper to a straw yellow, way harder than any western saw you’ll find. I tried cutting some teeth with my yasuri, it felt familiar. I set the teeth with my hammer. Then I took a pair of pliers and bent the tooth the other way – SNAP! Steel hard enough to make acceptable edge wear character.

I’m getting way off topic though. The photo above is a little sawing exercise. Wedges are something I use constantly, sawing, leveling, carpentry. So it helps to have good stock on hand. Normally I cut these with my bandsaw, but what the heck, how about with good old ryoba 210mm?

You can gang cut all of one side at a time to minimize changing sides so many times. God I love this BF vise.

Cut lots, because the tool gnomes that live in your wood shed like to sneak in and steal them at night…seriously, where do all these wedges disappear to? This is a good use of construction lumber off-cuts, and you can practice cutting to a line many times while actually making something useful.

I was in Sears Trostel Lumber, Fort Collins, the other day. Here you can see a live edged slab of Siberian elm, don’t dare look at the price.

Same thing for this crotch slab of walnut that you have to sell your first born child to afford. The funny thing is that this is not a great piece of lumber, its just the way it is cut, and the fact that it was carefully dried that makes it so valuable. Of course, almost nobody buys stuff like this, you gotta know what you’re doing with it, but still…gets you in the mood to saw some lumber.

I changed out my old silk line for a thicker one. In this case I overcame the defects of the previous line by plying this one together from the original, plus as much twist as I could dump into it on my spinning wheel. That’s twist in the singles, when its plied together it gains balance and doesn’t bind up on you in use. In any case this new line is much better for marking logs. Thicker, way way more storage of energy, holds more ink, and marks a cleaner line. I also had to seal the inside of my sumitsubo with epoxy to keep the wood from sucking all the moisture from my ink.

I spent some time yesterday playing with ideas about quarter sawing on a small scale, sort of modeling out the work holding for when I get bigger material.

Nice little level for dropping your lines and center lining. I actually have two of these so they can be checked against each other.

I also put way more set into the rip teeth on this 240mm ryoba. The plate is .020″ and I pushed the set out to .035 kerf as measured by feeler gauge, much smoother cut surfaces resulted, much less binding on the plate. Its stupid to try to use a very fine kerf if you end up with heavy steps in the saw surface that requires planing off a bunch of material to flatten. Its much faster to just increase the saw set and take the material off at the saw. An interesting thing that a heavier set can actually save against waste of wood.

In any case, though these disposable saws can be re-sharpened (I know I’ve got a hell of a lot of practice doing just that) they’re basically mush. No spine at all, you can really feel it when they start to dull. Good for cutting your teeth, so to speak, but I’m ready for a better saw. Several better saws, in fact.

I just met another neighbor with many beetle kill trees for the asking, I’ll be heading over today to check it out. Keeping my fingers crossed for big trees. Happy sawing!

About seven or eight miles further west up into the mountains from me, nestled between two north south ridges, is a nice little stand of trees by an aspen grove. The tree in the photo is midslope, west facing. Its also dead, killed by pine beetle like millions of others for miles around.

I didn’t get this tree today, but marked it “tree” for later felling, thanks to the generosity of some fine neighbors, who are building a new home on the property and will be getting some of the lumber once its sawn. I know its hard to tell the scale of the tree from the photo, I should have been standing next to it, but its about 2′ diameter at the base, massive compared to the stuff I’ve sawn up to now. This is just one of the trees that need to be taken out, there were several others within 50′ of the road that were begging to be turned into beautiful boards, and the stand extended further back by quite a ways from the road.

Did my first honest job of felling a tree today, something not small enough you could push it over, and it felt really great. Getting the tree to fall where I needed it to (and not on me!)

I didn’t want to take all of Janice’s day, so settled on two trees, three lengths of eight foot, that were small enough to get loaded in the truck easily and came on home delighted like a kid with candy. I wish I had a felling axe and a broad axe, maybe someday. Chainsaw screams at you when you use it, but its damn quick. And damn quick to cut off your face if you let it.

The sumitsubo is working much better with the new line. My silk keeps on packing down, I keep on adding more, where does it go…but at least I’ve gotten comfortable keeping the moisture balance right in the ink pot to give clear lines. I use my thumb to press on the silk as I’m drawing the line back. You can see where my thumb goes right afterward to hold the reel in place, with the middle finger to press the string to the mark.

Eat your heart out chalk line! Sumisashi for marking the end of the log after trimming with my madonoko which leaves a nice smooth surface. The ink line throws very well into the hollows, and did the best job I’ve ever seen on the oblique surface for the outside boards. You have to pull the line waaaay back compared to marking with an ink line on flat boards in the shop, give it enough energy to push into all the hollows.  You also can’t mess about with snapping the line, you’re ink will dry and not give a good line. It still misses small spots, but I use the sumisashi freehand to finish the line or go over any spots that are not dark enough.

Can you figure out from the picture what he’s doing? Even the best sumitsubo technique will leave gaps in the cut line mark, especially logs with heavy curve and irregular surfaces. Some of the fun stuff to saw though! You need an accurate way of sighting in the line to mark it with a brush where the line won’t reach. One of those things you could wonder about for a long time and not figure out, in “Reading Trees”  by Iichi Hayashi.

Thanks for reading, the sawing continues after the maebiki-oga gets a fresh sharpening.

Its funny, I had just been talking about needing a book with decent photos of traditional Japanese construction. My mother was up at the Library today, evidently there was a deal on books, $5 and you could fill a bag. She comes back with a couple sacks, among them “Old Barn Plans” by Richard Rawson, “The Timber Framing Book” By Stewart Elliott and Eugenie Wallas, and “Traditional Domestic Architecture of Japan” by Teji Itoh.  It deals mainly with the country home in Japan known as a minka. Its certainly not a timber framer’s book, but has a lot of great detail concerning the cultural and material influences that shaped the dwelling for rural Japanese.

This poto made me think of you Sebastian, and your hillside that you would see built well. The elevation changes on the left are quite dramatic, held together by what appear to be dry stack stone walls.

How about a cold weather structure? Thatching on the roof and the walls. I live in country that wants to burn, so when you build walls with straw it needs to be covered with adobe, but the lesson is the same, there are models of Japanese architecture for colder climates.

The broad expanse of gable would not look out of place in the mountains of the Midwest, though one usually sees vast expanses of glass in place of the shoji and amado.

I’ve looked at many diagrams for roof architecture, with its hewn natural beams and posts that support the rafters. Somehow a shot looking up into it tells so much more. The photo on the left really encapsulates the design ethos that tugs at the heart of those who love these buildings. The roof is straw, the eaves are fired clay shingle, the structure is wooden, the windows are fiber covered, the walls are clay, the floor is wood, stone, and earth. The are so many places in this world where people build with these same modest materials, and we call them mud huts.

My favorite design element, the heavy overhanging eaves. I can truly imagine living with such a space, enjoying the shade in the summer. The posts that support the outside edge of the roof allow for the wonderful raised veranda. It speaks volumes when a home has its main transit corridors around the outside of the structure and not through its heart.

Before structure comes skill, and a knowledge of the materials. A great way to do that is through hand tools, which never let you forget a knot or wonky grain. Today was the second meetup of the NoCo daiku study group. I’ve been sawing, so it was a great opportunity to examine some traditional techniques. Here Eric is doing a great job of showing how these saws are meant to be pulled to the center.

As it turns out, pipe strapping and some screws make an excellent hold down once the log has been sawn to the point where log dogs don’t hold.

I made a new handle for my maebiki-oga, quite a bit more length than the last one, and with a little bit more leaning back, less perpendicular to the tooth edge. Both the maebiki-oga and the larger madonokos are quite sensitive to how much power is put into the cut. They’re such aggressive saws that its easy to try to bite off more than you can pull back. The length of handle is really a lever. When you’re starting a cut or working through the cross-grain of a knot it helps to hold the saw above the tooth line, let the saw work under its own weight. The more depth of cut, the more power to the tooth edge, and one or both hands can move below the tooth line to let the handle work as a lever.  My previous handle was too short to allow me to use that natural principle of leverage, my wrists suffered as a result, trying to push the saw down in the cut.

Do I need to point out how cool it is that I can cut up logs while seated? It really is a whole body motion, yesterday my thigh was cramping something terrible, couldn’t tell you how exactly it was involved in the sawing motion, but it gets a workout.

Here’s Mr. Hayashi with an absolute monster of a maebiki-oga, long handle to match, with a hand grip that really saves your fingers from doing so much work holding on to the saw as you pull back. Even his foot position is worthy of note. Based on the saw dust streaming from the cut and the amount still stuck in the tooth gullets, he just pulled back with some serious strength.

Its a fairly simple matter for me to saw through and through, making nice 4/4 and 6/4 flatsawn  boards, but what about the coveted vertical grain? There are multiple approaches to getting the best yield of vertical grain boards from a log, I take the most straight forward.

My maebiki-oga looks especially nice in the light of this photo, really taking some character from the polishing of use.

This log is a bit small to make it worth quartering, but the huge spiraling split that’s down to the heart of the log fits rather nicely into a single quarter. There’s some serious twist in this log, but that’s really common with the winds we get up here. If I ever find a good stand of straight timber, my god, that would be heaven. Its not like the blue stain pine you find on the open market comes from better quality trees in Colorado, the stuff for sale in Sears Trostel, Fort Collins, CO is comparatively worse, and suffers greatly from what I see as poor drying conditions.

I take quarter-sawn literally. For some it has come to mean vertical grain orientation, where the annular growth rings are at an angle greater than 60 degrees from the face of the board. If you’ve been a woodworker long enough, you’ve probably come across the illustrations of various grain orientations relative to board placement in the log, or the different styles of milling logs. By directly quartering I am able to take boards off the faces of the quarters, alternately, until there’s nothing left. The best vertical grain, and the widest boards come off first, and then the angle of the annular growth rings relative to the face of the board starts to drop. Its not the best way to saw if you want perfect vertical grain on every board, but it wastes a lot less material than radial sawn.

One interesting variation of radial sawing that I would like to try is radially sawing a log for capboard siding, which removes the associated waste problem while producing a high grade product. For some reason I see a lot of wood siding products on the market these days that are flat sawn, actually re-sawn from dimensional stock. It would be a good use for some of these smaller logs that I come across, 10-12″ diameter, which would leave you with 5-6″ wide capboard with a live natural edge, very cool look.

Quartering the log went relatively fast with only two cuts to saw down.

And now we introduce the band saw. If I had a decent saw with a thin kerf compared to my maebiki-oga that was a bit smaller you’d probably be seeing photos of me sawing by hand. As it is I am simply not going to be sharpening after every board cut, too much frustration over poor quality steel. I’m on the lookout for good rip saws, but I want to pay for it with the proceeds of lumber that I sell, which will take a while…

The roller feed tables are really important. Actually I have only one at the moment, I’m using a camera tripod on the far left to support the quarter as the cut is started.

I tried to take my boards off with a fence on the saw table, but it tended to accumulate deviation from cut to cut, and was simply too difficult to use with only one person moving the quarter against the fence. Plus these quarters had several days to relax and warp a bit. Snapping a fresh straight line for every board and cutting freehand without a fence turned out to be much more accurate. I am really loving my ink line, finally getting the hang of it. Such beautiful dark lines! They are a pleasure to the eye.

I’m using a 1/2″, 3TPI bandsaw blade. My bandsaw has 13″ resaw capacity, but the 1HP motor makes me think that I want to not push the limits of the table’s capacity. This pine is quite soft though, and the saw handled it really well.

Don’t worry, I turned the saw off to take this picture. My mantra was, “Don’t cut your fingers off!”. The closest I’ve ever come to losing a finger was with a bandsaw, nearly cut the tip of my thumb off, but that was when I was a teenager and I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two from the experience.

I was worried that I would have to be reaching around the blade to wedge open the cut, but all the boards warped away from the quarter during the cut. I’m cutting all 4/4, just seemed the most useful size for me right now.  With 6/4 slabs and vertical grain 4/4 boards I’ll be able to make shoji!

If it wasn’t for grain runout from the twist in the log these boards would be really top quality. I suppose the sawyers around here would quarter saw blue stain pine if you asked them to, but I’ve never seen it for sale. For this 5″ x 8′ board, even at $3.00 bf this is only a ten dollar board once its seasoned. The flat sawn stuff sells for about $2.50 bf at the moment.

Your boards loose width with every one that you take off, eventually you are left with 1×1″ square, perfect for cutting stickers to air dry the lumber. If you’re building industrial size stacks of softwood to dry you want your stickers to be wider to help bear the weight, but I’m not planning on going that big. There’s really very little waste sawing in this manner.

All of the boards laid out so you can see what comes from one small log. Not too shabby, though the splitting ruined one of the quarters. Big timber, here I come!

Finally I have a chance to put the new hikouki kanna I made to work with a little kumiko pattern exercise from Desmond King’s first book “Shoji and Kumiko Design”.  Futae Kaku-Tsunagi roughly translates to double right angle connection and is a great trial of accurate kumiko lap cut joinery, as well as careful fitting of mitered corners.

I cut a slew of 1/4″ thick kumiko from redwood, which takes a beautiful polish from the kanna. Any pattern starts with a plan, and for this one it can be layed out on a single story stick. As complicated as this pattern looks, it involves only two separate groups of kumiko.

My workspace. The concrete gets pretty hard to sit on by the end of the day, but its worth it to not have my back feel like hell from spending so much time hunched over a bench.

The POV for one of the fundamental tategu sawing positions, kneeling in front of low saw-horses. If your dozuki technique is not good you’ll bind in the cut and have a hard time holding the kumiko steady on the horses.

Transferring marks from the story stick to each group of kumiko to be cut. The pencil line tells me which side of the line to cut on and mark for the other side of the lap cut that allows these pieces to fit together.

Nakaya Eaks 210mm kumiko saw really leaves an amazingly thin kerf. I’ve cut kumiko joinery with a larger dozuki saw, but the Nakaya really has me spoiled. The problem is that the slightest slipup tends to kink the blade, and they have to be ordered from Japan. Time to stock up!

With both groups of kumiko cut the assembly fun can begin!

The jigumi gets glued together, hopefully with the right kumiko in the right place, with its proper up/down or left/right orientation. Somehow I always manage to turn one around and am left hoping that my layout was stellar enough that everything is perfectly symmetrical. In traditional shoji screens the kumiko are often sort of woven together, its not a true weave, but the notches tend to alternate top to bottom. With a jigumi like this where notches are all on one side of a given piece of kumiko you end up with a warped screen if your lap cut notches are too tight.

All of the mitered end pieces are cut from the same stock of kumiko made previously, just with certain sections cut away. It wastes some lumber, but saves a tremendous amount of time from allowing you to cut the lap cuts as a group.  Pretty cool, it took me a long time of staring at this pattern to see that the whole thing is based on only two groups of kumiko.

In order for the mitered corners come together tightly every piece is individually marked and trimmed so that it is slightly proud of its theoretical proper length.

The horizontal pieces were cut for the top half first, and then verticals added. Because I was only installing a small piece from each kumiko at a time I had to keep things organized, and numbered each left to right.

Finally you can see where this pattern thing is going, double right angle connection. It never ceases to amaze me how awesome some carefully cut bits of wood can look.

Fitting kumiko is quite time consuming, and I stopped at the end of the day to go look at some logs of my neighbor. Its difficult to get an idea of scale, but the large ones in the group are just over 16″ diameter, pretty good size. But really long dead, super dry, and checked all to hell. As it turns out there’s quite a range in log quality when it comes to beetle kill lumber. I was recently trying to work out the value of a given log. I ran across a sawmill website:

http://www.sunrisesawmill.com/Log-Prices

Bascially, price payed by a saw mill is given per thousand board feet, determined by the cosmetic grading of the log and a calculation of volume using the diameter at the small end of the log and the Doyle scale.  The best I can tell a reasonable price per board foot would be something like $0.10. So a two foot diameter beetle kill log eight foot long, containing 200 BF of usable lumber by the Doyle scale is worth about $20 USD, haha. Try that with Black Walnut and the numbers come out much, much different. Of course, if you buy a peeled log from a sawmill of that diameter it will probably cost upwards of $15 dollars a linear foot! As it turns out, the price for blue stain pine at my local lumber dealer, at $2.82 per BF for flat sawn 4/4 is quite high, $1.50-1.75 is much more average across Colorado from what I can find online.

I continued on the pattern work the next day, today, but got an email from another neighbor about the trees I had previously marked, and a chance to get them in my truck!

I think I marked three trees, this is just one of them, the bottom half actually, cut into three 8′ sections. Finally, a big log at 16″! How do I call this big? Yes, there’s bigger out there, but just try to move this sucker! It was a real struggle just to get it in the truck, and the bar on my chainsaw wasn’t long enough to buck straight across.

Standing dead, so still a bit of checking, but really beautiful by beetle kill standards. Only 1/8 twist in this tree compared to the 1/4 twist of the last one, with also very little taper. So much lumber! Cut with a hand-saw! Ok, I’ll save my excitement for tomorrow when I have to actually saw them. But you can tell, yes, I’m going to make some beautiful slabs and quarter saw. I sealed the end grain cuts with some wood glue thinned down by half with water, trying to head off additional checking.

And came back inside to finish up the kumiko pattern. I hope you’ve enjoyed the juxtaposition of my day between large/heavy and small/refined, I do seem to get around. Lets just hope I can do at least one of these things well!

I’ve been sawing over the past week the sections of big tree that by some miracle was able to be loaded in my truck. I started with one of the smaller sections, marking at 1-3/4″ on center, so making boards of 1-5/8″ after the kerf is considered. Really I think of this cut as 6/4, the thickness I need for shoji rail/stile. I was amazed to get such a good mark of the ink-line for the ouside boards. Some of it had to be marked in by eye with the sumisashi.

And, after a day of sawing, I came to the parting off. I’ve been told that the maebiki-oga looks almost cartoonish in scale. It starts to make perfect sense when you’re cutting through more than 12″. This log was heavy enough that I had to waylay my brother into helping me lift it onto the horse. It almost tipped over the whole affair in the process. I guess that’s how you know that the log is getting heavy enough to mill horizontally. Ideally one person can accomplish any of this stuff with a bit of ingenuity.

The sawdust makes sitting on the ground quite comfortable. Or kneeling for that matter.

If you understand the possibilities of the ramp you’ll save yourself a great deal of back ache. I almost, almost had a dumb moment and tried to lift the log up onto the cradles. Apparently I can learn!I keep on putting my cant hook in photos as well, hopefully you can understand how fucked you’d be not to have this tool and try to move heavy logs. I need some heavy towing chain and a couple log hooks though, I could definitely use some more tools.

For the next log I picked the largest one. Since it was slightly oblong in cross-section I marked my boards to maximize accurate marking surface as opposed to width of board. Somebody linked to a great video of a Japanese carpenter sawing a log: http://www.en.charpentiers.culture.fr/treesintohouses/fromtheforesttotheworksite/pitsawing/pitsawinginjapan?media

I want his trestles! Next time I pick up some timber I’ll be getting something smaller I can hew to boxed heart 8×8 for heavy trestles. Oh, wait that wasn’t the link that I was thinking about. In any case I used a guide for the start of the cut.

Should I point out how epic it is to be sawing horizontally? I don’t know, it like a revolution for me, not to be vertical. It really changes everything.

To cut off one board at a time, to really be able to focus on each board face cut, its dramatic. And useful! Not to be constantly moving the log. I’m cutting this one to 2″ slabs.  It took me quite a while to get a proper posture for holding the saw. The hand higher up the handle holds the saw plate itself. For the best control I laid my thumb along the back spine of the plate. Doing anything the same way for a long time gets fatiguing, so you have to change it up every once in a while, try new things. Your body figures it out or you injure yourself, so its fairly self correcting.

I was worried that having the plate ride against the lower side of the kerf would make it difficult to cut to the line. Oddly enough its actually easier to be accurate sawing horizontally. I mean, dramatically better quality of cut. Perhaps it is harder to put power into the cut with the loss of gravity assisting in the vertical orientation, but practice and training can overcome.

So, which direction do you start the cut from? I’ve tried top to bottom, bottom to top, it doesn’t matter from the saw’s perspective. What does matter is not pissing into the wind. What I mean is to saw such that the wind carries the saw dust away from the  plate. If it blows back onto the top of the plate it creates friction in the kerf, and that makes for a terrible time sawing. Binding of any kind, avoid it like the plague, be it from pitch build up, wandering off the line, warping boards, poor wedge technique. The sawing is fun and easy when the plate rides lightly in the kerf.  The only time its impossible to avoid a bit of binding is sometimes at the start of the cut before the plate is deep enough to get wedges in there. Sometimes the boards just really want to clamp together, other times its because you didn’t start the cut in plane and bind as you correct back to the line.  In any case, its a serious pain in the ass with the super deep plate of the maebiki-oga. A frame saw has its advantages too.

How could I not talk about sharpening the saw? I thought I had a grasp on edge wear with my maeiki-oga. The 16″ cuts for this log taught me a serious lesson. With an eight inch cut the maebiki-oga eats through that shit, even when less than perfectly fresh. Its a question of force per unit area, you know? So for a heavy cut, you feel it right away when the saw is a little dull. It took at times several sharpenings to get through a board, simply because a saw that is a little bit dull is no good in a heavy cut, it just doesn’t remove the material the right way. The knots are not kind to the edges of the saw either. Not to mention how much effort it saves. And my body always appreciates the rest to sharpen the saw.

Going through a knot? The saw will not let you miss it. I can almost draw the board for you while I’m sawing it.

Well, there’s more to it then that which I had hoped to convey. I guess in the end you’ll figure it out if you put the time into it. I struggle at times to find a context for the amount of time I’m putting in to learning the use of this saw. As hard as the work is physically, its almost beside the point, I just seem to love the kobiki work. My bandsaw blade gave up the fight today and I just sighed, went back to the wall and picked up my maebiki-oga. A century of life for a tool that just keeps on giving with every sharpening.

The best work holding is a heavy log. So, take one log and saw it in half. Easy right? With an asymmetrical pith it takes a bit of eyeing the symmetry to decide where to cut. I clocked this cut, it took two hours of sawing.

In this case there was quite a pronounced crook at the bottom end of the log. I was glad that I had sawn through the crook halving the crotch wood. Looking at the inside of the tree it was clear that the main trunk had at one time died, and a side shoot took over as the primary, so there’s some really wild grain at the bottom. Its the kind of thing that I should have seen when bucking the tree to length and cut around.

At this point it became obvious that my center line had to be moved to better orient to the grain, and produce boards without excessive taper.  I thought I would saw the quarters on my bandsaw so no board cuts were marked at the time.  Knowing what I do now, that my bandsaw simply cannot handle heavy stock with the blade I’m running, I should have gone ahead and marked two boards on each log half either side of the center line.

One of my neighbors, Tuck, dropped by and gave me a log. Now, this is the truck you want if you’re picking up logs! I’ve come up with a couple better ways of loading logs in my pickup truck, but this is what the pro’s use.

This reminds me, I was watching a video the other day about a guy loading a giant red gum in Australia. The loading process is not that remarkable, but the end of the video shows a really unusual saw mill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jprbiKIoZZE

Ever seen a giant circular saw connected to the boom arm of a bobcat? Wild stuff, I would not have wanted to be the guy standing there taking the video.

I added this simple back stop to hold the bottom of the quarters. I suppose I should pick something a bit more durable looking. If this were to break the log would swing back like a pendulum and deck me in the skull. Up to this point I’ve been simply screwing the log to the horse, but for a log quarter you end up putting too many screw holes into the bottom of every board you make.

Now knowing that I need to saw most of the quarter by hand I leveled one face and marked the ends for each board cut. Even though I had sealed the end of the log with wood glue the sumisashi gave a fairly clear line.

My other work holding solution, screws and plastic pipe strapping. Not terribly elegant, and I’m working on something better, but it works. Log dogs are great for holding logs in a given orientation, not so much as a hold-down device.

This is what a dull saw looks like. The teeth actually take quite a polish from use. Edge wear is just polishing of the steel.

The site that I linked to in my previous post, Carpenters from Europe and Beyond, also have video of many other sawyers. One of them:

Pit Sawing in Turkey

It shows a rope hold down with board and wedge. Its a simple concept that I would use in a couple different points of holding on my ‘A’ frame saw horse, pictured is my favorite so far. One of the problems I’ve had is the log pivoting over the horse when sawing beneath it at the start of the cut. If you think about it, I could use a variation of this for holding the log vertically in lieu of the pipe strapping. You can tell that I don’t go to any extra effort to make this stuff look nice, its all about function.  I also had to add an extra log cradle on the bottom rest to bring the log high enough up off the ground that I could saw underneath with a full comfortable stroke.

And! My wooden floor, how’s this Mark? Good old mother earth and a bed of soft sawdust.

The whale-noko needs frequent sharpening, thankfully its quick. Perhaps you can hear that some of the teeth in the center are harder than the others?  I start with a small square file to form both facets of the chone-gake. At the moment I’m using a 100mm yasuri to file the top bevel that forms the edge. This is a normal sharpening, only some of the chone-gake need adjustment, there’s enough set for many sharpenings, and the top bevel haven’t become too wide to require cutting down of the major tooth angles. I use a coarse diamond plate for jointing the tooth line. Soon to come, video of the saw at work.

The process of sawing a beetle kill pine log into 4/4 (1″) thickness boards, using an antique Japanese hand saw known variously as a Maebiki-Oga, Whale Back Saw, Whale Noko.

The work was accomplished over two days, starting with peeling and marking the log. It produced 58.78 Board Feet of lumber, a value of $165.76 at my local retail price of $2.82 per BF. For two days of labour, ten hour days, that works out to $8.28/hr of value produced. Not too bad for a hand saw, right?

Shooting and editing a video takes a great deal of time! Let me know if you want to see more, otherwise I have some sawing to do, haha.

You know, I feel I am standing at a cross-roads looking for where to head next. If I want to truly make a living doing things like this it means studying with the right person, an apprenticeship. I don’t mean that I want to apprentice as a kobiki, haha, I love it but no. I’ve realized that shoji probably will not work for me as well, the local market is simply not here and crate shipping large items is a serious hassle.

I’m a tool maker at heart, and I love the nokogiri. Maybe there’s something in that.

I’ve been wanting to show the fuigo in operation, but have yet to get a dark enough work space set up to judge metal temperature. How about some shou sugi-ban? Needs to be done outdoors anyway. The mass production way to use this technique is with a large propane torch, but there’s something special about a large hot chunk of metal.  After shooting this video I used the last of the forge fuel in the fire-pot to cook a hot dog. Bon Appétit!

Did I mention that I can’t stand the sound of a shop-vac blower? This fuigo is bliss.

If you can make an axe handle, you don’t have to buy one from the company store. And in the making of it you have a story. And when you pass on the tool, having made something of quality, the story can grow.

I think of how many people have grandpa’s old axe rusting in a corner of the shed. So often we focus on the steel, who made it and to what quality. The end user side of the story is the handle, a little different for every one made by hand, speaking of place and the tools the person had to get the job done.

Back to story for a second. Having considered what I find compelling about a good woodworking text, it comes down to story. Its as simple as that. If you want to write a good woodworking  book, it needs the life told of the people that use the tools! Think of the books Toshio Odate has written. The knowledge is important, yes, but we live in an age where there’s an exponentially increasing body of free knowledge to those who have internet access. My favorite part of Odate’s work is when he relates some little anecdote about his apprenticeship, or of some other story he’s heard. It puts in context how as woodworkers we don’t have some slavish love for the tool a priori. It is the relationship between the tool, the user, and the work that is bonded with love and to which we give our passion.

When you make something, you make it worth so much more than the steel. In someone else’s hands it becomes your story, writ in the curves of the making and the patina of use. So make something and tell a story.

This is a cheap and poorly tempered axe. That’s okay, you need one for certain things. Like chopping roots in the ground, chopping a hole in a roof, chopping through a door, you get the picture. Its not great, but you could certainly chop tree’s down too. Hell, even practice a bit of bump hewing and impress the ladies with your axe skill (women care about that, right?).

I’ve never made one of these before and I left it a little fat around the upper neck of the handle. I used the broken fiberglass handle as the pattern for the new one.

They should teach this in primary education, how to hang a tool on a handle with a proper wooden wedge and good fitting. They could use the knives they would get in the fourth grade for sharpening their pencils!

I’m taking my tool storage mobile, with a 40″ long tool crate, plenty of room in there. The only joinery I changed was using tongue and groove for the top and bottom boards, because I don’t have anything dry that is wide enough. I love any chance I can get for using my plow plane to cut tongue and groove, love it!

I had made a smaller tool crate not too long ago, and its small enough to fit inside the new one. The dimensions came straight from Odate’s “Japanese Woodworking Tools”, its really of a size that can house a whole trade’s worth of hand-tools. Its really nice to have it right behind me as I work sitting down. I’m a gonna make me a six foot long version of this one day to be buried in.

And finally, a bit of joinery. These are the pieces for mitsu-kude (三つ組手), the three way joint for forming a hexagonal kumiko jigumi (wooden lattice work). Some of the coolest and most expensive kumiko-zaiku patterns have hexagonal jigumi, so of course I must try this, even though there are much simpler square patterns I still need to learn.  You don’t learn what you don’t care about. I’m not going to slog through a bunch of patterns I’m not excited about just for the sake of consistency. Learning happens when you say, “That’s stellar! I have to know how that works!”

Des King on cutting mitsu-kude

Two of the three are the same. Its most interesting to note how the layout here revolves around a center line of the mitsuke (thin edge) of the kumiko. That should be obvious for the two outside pieces pictured, but the middle piece has cuts on either side of the edge. When I first looked at it I wasn’t sure what the orientation was of the lap cuts relative to each other.

The first two pieces go together, leaving space for the third. Cool!

Finally I can make wooden snowflake ornaments for Christmas with proper Japanese joinery, haha! I’m going to have to make the jigs to cut a proper jigumi and mount it in a frame, this is just really awesome.

Up next I’m working on a custom piece of furniture, a built in rolling closet unit for an unusual space. I’ll be going all out with some new joinery I haven’t tried before in White Ash, its sure to be a bit of a Chris Hall moment.

I bought about sixty board foot of White Ash to make a rolling cabinet. Its to fit into a 19″ wide opening underneath the 12/12 pitch incline of roof in the corner closet of a bedroom.

Honestly I was thinking “light and strong” when I was shopping lumber, as well as a certain quality of calm face grain and not too much contrast in the color of the wood itself.  Never having used White Ash before, it surprised me with its weight. Definitely a hard wood, feels comparable to red oak in a lot of respects, but has proven easier to work. Total bill for the lumber was about $275.

Where did the Ash come from I wonder? Its been planed, but there’s still enough saw mark to tell it was sawn on a circular saw mill. Some of the writing on it marking a batch number tells me it was probably one of the larger dedicated hardwood mills, modern equipment. I struggled to find good grain, they had about 300bf available and I pulled through all of it. Even many dedicated woodworkers don’t like to sift through to the bottom of a heavy pile of hardwood, so that’s where most of the good pieces were left. I’ve also watched professional cabinetmakers  of the modern variety pull boards off a bunk almost indiscriminately, something I don’t understand.

Whatever tree or trees the lumber I bought came from were also not so straight, with most of the eight foot lengths I bought being sections of internode between branches, where you get that heavy reversing/rising rain on both ends of the board.

It involved a regrettable amount of waste for me to saw around defects and drop either edge of most of the boards to get my rough cut lengths.

The largest panels I’m gluing up will be 18.75″ x 6′. It makes me nervous to do such a long and wide multi board glue up, so I only glued one joint at a time. Besides, it makes a big difference to how much work planing the panel out will be, to get the glue up just right. The boards are all 4/4 (about 15/16″) and need a finished thickness of 3/4″. As anyone who has tried this will find out, its pretty easy to glue a cup or serious twist into your panel if the edge jointing isn’t done well. Thankfully I don’t have to suffer the prevarications of a poorly made jointer or planer, I have hand planes.

Sometimes with hardwood it feels like you’ve brought a knife to a gun fight, using hand tools. Well, it is a knife wedged in a block of wood. There’s no secret to it, you just need a really consistently sharp cutting edge, set evenly from the sole. Oh, and a properly conditioned dai, with its edge perfectly square to its contact points on the sole. And a planing beam with its face as perfectly flat as you can render it. And an edge runner perfectly parallel to the face of the planing beam. And then I guess you need acceptable technique and stamina.

Damn, I’m making it sound difficult, its not. It just takes concentration and strong hands.

My planing beam is proving to be a bit short for the task, but I made it work. If I have a lot of material to take off I’ll plane the board on edge so that I can use my body weight and gravity more effectively. It also allows you to use the cutting edge of the plane iron more evenly between sharpening.

The beam is also the reference surface for checking the straightness of the edge. In a way you are checking how flat your planing beam is when you joint a board to its surface. When you compare two boards edge together that have been planed to the same reference any deviation is doubled. Thankfully, even though my planing beam is thin it has had a good year to settle and dry. It still moves enough to cause me headaches, but I know where to look now when I’m checking it.

This happened to me for the first time with the blade to my sole conditioning kanna. I’ve felt over the past couple of months my sharpening technique improve, but my 60mm blade is apparently just too back heavy and long to stick to the stone. Its nice to have concrete examples of improving technique.

And way to go homemade clamps! They don’t develop near the pressure of a metal screw clamp, but have proven to get the job done quite well in this case. Now I just need twice as many of them, haha.