I’m down at my Grandfather’s house hanging some security doors on his deck. And, being the optimistic fellow that I am, was able to explain the benefits of using a bit of honest joinery to add a post for the hinge rail of the door. The main sill beam of the wall had been cantilevered out to support the eave beam at the edge of the roof, but it was a bit under sized to the task and managed to noticeably sag over a couple of decades. So, time to jack the beam up and slip a post in!

I had to cut the mortise upside down, very different experience. All the swarf wanted to drop right out of the mortise, which was nice, but then most of it managed to head for my eyes.

Beam with centerlines drawn, and tenon cut and killed with a hammer.  I read recently in “The Complete Japanese Joinery” about the joinery for shikii and kamoi, the grooved sill and header boards which serve as the track for fusuma and shoji in traditional Japanese homes. Because they are installed after the posts are erected they must use some creative joinery to allow their secure installation. The most simple joinery involves a mortise on one side and toe nailing the other, which is basically what was employed here.

Assembly was easy, the compression from hammering the tenon surfaces coupled with the sheer weight of the roof made seating the tenon a breeze. Plus it was only really a stub tenon. I put two screws through to lock the tenon, but its not like the roof is going anywhere that it hasn’t in the past fifty years. Could hold up a beer bottle!

Ok, setting a post is not a big deal, but is really out of the norm for the work I’ve done professionally as a carpenter. Normal would be butt joints and you screw that sum b**ch in there and get on with it. It made a work day very fun!

My plane iron did this on the stone, very cool! Couldn’t get it to stick twice though. It really looks like it shouldn’t be able to stick like that.

I’ve done a fair amount of work on this house in the past, including cutting the scallops on the beam edges with a chainsaw. Cutting one beam end up on a ladder with a power tool like that is fun, but thirty? That just starts to feel like work.

I like hanging doors though, it takes a lot of consideration for all of the plumb surfaces involved to do it well. All this needs is a bit of paint for the post and the corner boards and it’ll be on to the next one.

Hip roof joinery, here I come!

A little warm up joinery? Looks simple enough. This is a simple form of isuka tsugi, or halved rabbeted oblique scarf splice. I’m hosting a Japanese carpentry study group meetup this Saturday to study these joints, so I wanted to get in a bit of practice such that I’ll be useful explaining what I’ve learned.

This joint is mainly used on cosmetic applications, like the interior ceiling rafters on a drop ceiling in traditional Japanese construction. Its also used as a ware-away on the top of batter posts when laying out a foundation, not a friendly surface to sit on and throw off the layout, haha.

I’ve never seen a western carpenter cut spikes on the top of a foundation layout posts for stretching string lines, I wonder why. OSHA may have a fit! When I recently layed out the foundation post holes for the greenhouse I built I actually ran in to the problem of people wanting to sit or lean on my batter posts.  Hell, I wanted to sit on them, or grab the top to stand myself from a seated position. Good idea, and good practice for apprentices new to the saw.

What you notice right away is that the central rip shares a cut line on the end face. At first I assumed that I’m missing something important in cutting this joint. But consider, if you first cut half way down the end grain face for either side, most of the joint is well defined on its face grain cheek surfaces. I tried my best to ride the edge of the adjacent kerf without slipping into it, but its all but impossible. The saw slips into the kerf and undercuts the cheek surface a bit.

Surfaces from the saw, marking with sumisashi and ink on 1-1/2″ square stock, using 210mm ryoba saw.

For such small cross section material it made more sense to use a marking knife and kebiki for the joint layout. I also used my dozuki saw and a piece of kumiko as a cutting guide. I’m slow with my sashigane, I know that from watching better carpenters than I at work via Youtube. It took me longer to lay out the joint than to cut it.

On to a more complicated variation. Here’s what it looks like when you draw it incorrectly, haha.  While in the midst of this useless layout a small bird flew into my shop and slammed into some window glass trying to chase a fly. The poor little fellow was so dazed I was able to pick him up and find a tree nook for him to recuperate. It wasn’t a great moment, the bird might have had a broken neck. Thankfully a little fresh air and he took back to the skies. And I was able to draw the joint correctly, well sort of.

I scaled up the lumber a bit to 2″ square. This variation has a cool parallelogram key to lock the joint, sachi-sen. I didn’t get the ratio of length to cross section correct, and I’m actually missing a bunch of cut lines, but I started cutting to find out. Made a bunch of cuts actually, all over the place.

With not much wood removed as a result.

Most of the material removal came down to being chopped away with a 1″ bench chisel. This blue stain pine is very soft, the chisel work was fast.

The mating joint is identical in all respects. I wised up a bit and added more cut lines. I shouldn’t have taken out the waste portion of the ‘v’ in this photo, it removed my cut lines for the central rip before I had a chance to saw to the line! Still not much of a problem though.

Looks like the subject of an Escher print.

The assembled joint, planed out and keyed with a tapered oak wedge. The joint showed a tendency for the two halves to assemble with twist if there was any proud surfaces. Getting the joint to come together in plane seems to be the major challenge of doing an acceptable job.

Feeling warmed up? Time for hip roof joinery.

From “Wood Joints in Classical  Japanese Architecture” we have this wonderful little hip roof model, of the intersection between the wall sill plates, or keta, and the hip rafter/adjoining jack rafters. The model has a pitch of 5/10. So, how the hell to go about building this thing? Its a murky depth to probe at first. There’s something really important about having the pieces in your hand as you mark for cuts, looking at the orientation. I’m also working (almost) entirely in metric, the time saved converting decimals to inches is appreciated. I still want a sashigane with square root scale, even if it means working in shaku.

Ahh, the good old compound miter for the jack rafter. Top face marked 45 degrees to plan, side faces marked with common rafter 5/10 pitch using the carpenters square. Bread and butter stuff if you’re cutting a stick framed roof.

The top edge of the hip rafter is beveled to stay in the plane of the roof, and the jack rafter has to meet that plane evenly. So how do you find the angle for beveling the top of the hip rafter? It gets more interesting than that, there’s a common “pivot point”, or toge that represents where the bottom face of the rafter meets the base line of the top of the sill plate. Usually it would seem toge is often an imaginary point a little above the center line of the keta beams. It matters because the joinery has to be cut on the hip rafter such that the top planes that form the roof slope lie in the same plane as the common rafters, there’s a relationship there that is not immediately clear how to apply in layout for the cutting of the joint.

For the purposes of my model I made toge 5mm above the centerline.

The sashigane is the most important tool in this awesome adventure. Can you say, hip rafter pitch?

Finding the bevel angle for the top of the hip rafter involved measuring along a  level line on the side face representing the 5/14.14 pitch for a distance half the width of the hip rafter.

The same use of the sashigane gives the plumb line as well, along which you can measure the distance to the bottom line of the jack rafters. I realized at this point that I made my hip rafter too deep, not sure about the proper proportioning yet.

On the keta, we have the center line above which is our imaginary pivot point. Based on the common rise/run of 5/10 I know that the bottom of the jack rafters will contact the top of the beam 10mm away from the center line. On the side face of the beam we have the all important kuchiwaki line, representing the bottom of the jack rafter notch.

“The Complete Japanese Joinery” was my main reference for understanding the process of layout. But I’ve already made a terminal error in my marking here, not to be found until I started cutting.

The downward slope of the jack rafter notching continues from the kuchiwaki line where it intersects the perpendicular keta beam. From there I measured up to find the slope cut on the nose of the beam. I couldn’t tell from the model if it was supposed to be flush with the top of the beam or slightly below.

At least I did a bang on job with the wedged tenon. This is the first time I’ve tried the technique of drilling small stress relief holes at the bottom of the saw kerfs on the tenon.

It should have been a simple matter to measure the notch depth, somehow it became way lower on the left side and I didn’t notice the twist until I started chiseling out the waste.

My second and more serious error was in the joinery for the hip rafter. The cuts on the side were properly marked at 5/14.14 pitch, but the spacing between marks for the bottom I multiplied from the keta beam using the square root of two, effectively marking for a 10/10 pitch roof…

At least I’ve reached an understanding of my mistakes, and know how to mark correctly for the next try. But that is for tomorrow, all this thinking of angles and hypotenuse makes for a night dreaming of triangles.

Hello! Tonight we go further down the rabbit hole that is Japanese hip roof joinery. Where might it lead? To building of course! I’m not sitting here in my shop obsessively building joinery models as an attempt at some kind of mental masturbatory self indulgence. This is about a little corner of structure, a fundamental of human existence. It is then, as they say, an existential topic to speak of timber joinery.

I think most peoples experience with structure has been entirely sub-optimal. Except, maybe if you’ve lived on a boat. But for most of us we don’t even know what we’re missing. If you have the misfortune to live less than a comfortable first world existence then necessity becomes the drive that creates the idea of a better circumstance, and often a better structure.

Tonight I had the good fortune to speak with Mark Grable for a bit on the telephone, I found it galvanizing. You have to understand the potential out there for people that are willing to get shit done. How bad do you want it, how badly? Now go find out.

So, to get back to the topic at hand, I’m giving it another try with the simple Japanese hip roof model. This is walking step by step towards structure by understanding one small piece of it at a time.

We have our two keta beams joined together with a wedged mortise and tenon. By the way, my model is about half scale to what is listed in the book. My keta measure 60mm by 80mm. I feel awkward trying to explain this because my own understanding is so rudimentary, but here goes.

You can see that the layout starts quite simply with the hip centerline drawn on the top surface of the joined beams. Then the width of the hip rafter can be added in parallel to the centerline. Lucky for me this is a normal hip roof, symmetrical between the wall edges at 45 degrees.

Next I added the lines parallel to the top centerlines that represent  the top and bottom edge of the common rafter notches. Because there is a jack rafter projecting out from the end of the centerline of either beam the kogaeri line must extend into the layout for the hip rafter notch.  Then the cut lines for the rafter notches can fall in place. It does make things look a bit crowded in there.

I remember the first time I looked at these hip roof models and the layout for it. Mush! Unless your a genius its hard to work out what’s going on. Give things a name, order appears, and structure commences.

From there we can draw a series of lines perpendicular to the hip rafter, they all seem to have their own names too. You can see I’ve made a nice little series of squares by intersecting at the centerlines of the keta. There’s almost a hip rafter notch, but I’ll have to do a bit of layout on the hip rafter to find out where to place one of the cut lines on the keta.

I started the hip rafter layout with the middle honchu line. Where as the common pitch of the roof (rise/run) is 5/10, the hip rafter uses its own pitch, 5/14.14, based on the relationship of the normal hip rafter being the hypoteneuse of a right triangle whose two sides are equal.

With our hip rafter pitch we can mark both a level line and a plumb line. In this case I saved myself some time by grabbing the plumb line with my bevel gauge and referencing to the edge and not the centerline. In practice I wonder if that would be possible. This whole endeavor does seem to depend on quite carefully dimensioned and squared material. I wonder what acceptable tolerances are for beam cross section and squareness?

I made a mistake yesterday in the spacing of these lines, because I was measuring along the edge of the hip rafter and converting the distance between lines on the keta mathematically to the distance along the hip edge. I cut that out entirely this time, measuring equal distances along the level line of the hip rafter run.

I used the same method to transfer the distance to the back face of the keta beams. The distance between nyuchu line and the back face of the keta beam is equal to the distance between honchu line and the tip of the notch on the back. This ensures that we get a triangle that will be 45 degrees to plan when the hip rafter is at the proper slope. Remember how those three intersecting lines helped form a series of squares on the keta? Now they’re a bit stretched out on the bottom of the hip rafter.

Next I added the level baseline that intersects with the bottom rafter line and nyuchu. Because the baseline for this model is above the keta centerline 5mm I had to mark a line below the baseline that represents the top of the keta beams. This new line, “top of keta” extends to a new point where it hits the bottom of rafter line.

Last for the hip rafter was marking the front of the notch where it intersects with the side of the keta beam.

I’ve drawn some stars to help point out the new line derived from the hip rafter that is the start of the notch on the keta. All that was left from there was dropping the hip rafter notch lines down the side of the keta beam to the correct depth. I made a mistake there yesterday, hit the wrong numbers in the calculator or something. So I decided to get the numbers both mathematically and graphically.

This time apparently I did things okay. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but most of my marks lined up pretty well.

Pretty cool looking!

I did make one mistake, my jack rafters are not meeting the hip rafter in plane, but that was another simple mistake with how I marked the depth of the jack rafter line on the hip rafter, and I’m getting too tired to explain it properly. Sebastian and I will be cutting a slightly more complicated model next week some time, we’ll try to explain it together and I look forward to continue exploring this aspect of house joinery. Its quite challenging, but fun!

Tonight, something a bit different.

I’ve been planing out the White Ash for the piece of cabinet work I’m building, but the exigencies of modern reality have me hustling to make a buck, traveling for work. So I’ll save the talk around planing out big hardwood panels for another time, today I work on something small and precious.

How about making a wooden comb?

So, I needed a comb to be able to trim my beard recently. I had given my normal comb to my mother in an emergency that involved her combing stinging honey bees out of her hair, bless the woman. She had gone and swept up a swarm of bees this spring from our hives that I was too frustrated to deal with, in a difficult spot on a bush close to the ground. Would you believe I’ve yet to be stung by a honey bee? But my mother was stung a bunch in the face, and needed a comb to get the bees out of her hair, for some reason long hair easily tangles them up (and they were trapped inside her veil).

Now that its winter again I need a comb for the all important facial hair, but she kept my comb, and what is a woodworker to do? Go out and buy a comb? Hell no! I’m a twenty first century kind of guy, I like to think could make you anything from a house to a tooth brush, so here goes.

Layout on Boxwood with ink, nice on the eyes. Beautifully dense wood by the way, I lust after larger pieces of Boxwood.

I used a really cheap ryoba pull saw to cut the teeth of the comb, needing a health width of kerf. I used a spacing between cuts of 3/32″. If I was making a larger comb for hair I might go for 1/8″ between cuts.

Then the teeth of the comb were tapered to a point with the help of abrasives. I actually used a belt sander with a 36 grit belt to quickly shape the profile, hand sanding is slow and meticulous work.

The teeth of the comb after sanding, each and every one! Finished out to 220 grit.

And then given a couple of coats of paste wax to make them shiny, people like stuff that’s shiny.

Of course, I couldn’t leave it at that. After all, there are possibilities inherent, design possibilities that must be explored. I have a bunch of thin pieces of different tropical hardwood lying around, time to put it to work!

Here’s one of them, with a strikingly red dust from sanding. Looks like the color oxidizes to an almost deep purple hue, I don’t suppose anyone knows what this is? I’m afraid to hazard a guess, I didn’t buy this lumber, someone gave it to me.

But it makes a nice looking comb, that’s for sure.

Well shit, that’s not good enough, I’m a joiner after all, how about a comb with some joinery? Lets solve the fundamental problem of grain direction in a comb.

I had to make the comb a bit thicker than I want to, at 5/16″, for the sake of the joinery. I’m limited because my smallest chisels are 1/8″ for cutting a mortise or dado. So lets join this up with a tiny sliding dovetail! I’m not sure, again, what the wood on the left is, but the comb teeth I made out of boxwood, very smooth stuff.

Cutting such small joinery is a good challenge.

But the results are satisfying. Time to open an Etsy store? I have lots of ideas for quick craft items like this. I’ve made plans to travel to Vermont for a couple months this coming January and cut a frame with Mark Grable for his forge. To that end my focus has to be working enough to be in the sound financial position to get out there and back. So its a hustle, everything counts. I have lots of the stuff I’ve made up for sale in my local market, fiber tools, shoji, even my fuigo, time to see what sells!

The daiku study group met again. We’re a varied group of craftspeople that understand the power and functionality of hand tools, always a cool group of people.

For today we started with a rip sawing exercise, cutting shims. It gives a lot of opportunity to correctly start cuts, and a feel for the saw in the cut as it rides the kerf. I didn’t do a good enough job explaining the exercise, it turns out the most challenging aspect for this was not the sawing, but correct marking, which is not at all surprising in light of the common difficulties for cutting more complicated timber joinery. The saw exercise for the next meetup will be lap joinery with backsaw/dozuki!

Interestingly, the one piece of kit that has been consistently absent from the tools that people bring is an appropriate sized rip saw for these common tasks of ripping lumber up to 4″ or so thick.

With the height of my bench surface we all ended up down on our knees while sawing, very natural.

Peter has this great little sashigane you can see on the bench in the foreground, perfect for smaller work, I just love it!

I was watching out of the corner of my eye as Peter cleaned up the radius of the keyed wedge for his marking gauge. He has a skill for making molding planes, good quality work using good quality Japanese chisels.

Its interesting to me that everyone very naturally maintains a consistent relationship of their head to the chisel. I go a bit farther and usually sit on the beam while mortising. The same relationship is maintained while paring down end grain by connecting your chin to the top of the chisel handle. Chisel/Body/Mind

Peter also has a very interesting set of Ray Iles Chisels, really solid construction and top quality steel. Its not every day you get to take a chisel like this in hand to try, they’re quite expensive.

We took as the model for our marking gauges one of the most commonly used in my shop for dimensioning and general layout work. A fence about 4″x3″, beam about eight inches , a keyed wooden locking wedge. As you can see we all got up to something a bit different. For instance, I wanted a double beam gauge for mortising, especially for scoring the sides of stopped dado. None of us were able to finish in the allotted time, which was partially by design. I’m hoping that this will encourage further work at home.

I used an exceptional little piece of oak for my fence, really dense stuff that required lots of sharpening for my kanna to plane properly. The beams are red oak, much more forgiving by comparison.

Odate shows a double beam gauge with separate wedges and mortises for each beam. I know that I’ve seen these where the beam shares the mortise, but I was unsure if it would create an adjustment problem, where tapping on one beam would change the other. And it is true that it does take a bit more care setting a measurement between beams, but I’ve so far found it not to be too tedious to use.

I hope that this meetup has expanded horizons, I know that I’ve learned from watching the work of others! I’m casting about for good ideas for the next time we get together, probably something along the lines of further developing fundamental skills, like making a matched set wooden straight edge locked with dovetail keys! That sounds like a good way to focus on bringing lumber to four sides square and a bit of re-sawing stock with bench vise or low saw horse. Not to mention a keyed sliding dovetail. I’m liking the exploration of joinery when it also creates a useful tool!

Yah, so you know that pretty starrett straight edge you paid a mint for? Its a darn wall ornament the first time you drop it if you don’t know how accurate surfaces are developed.

I love my sashigane but I’ve dropped it a bunch, and its not anything to write home about in terms of quality. With the use of a 24″ Veritas precision straight edge I can measure the deviation with a feeler gauge. How’d it do? Oh, not too bad I guess, .003″ was the maximum deviation. But that’s still enough to notice, especially when using it as a reference planing boards flat or using it to check the sole of your kanna. Besides, we need tools we can trust implicitly, tools that are bona fide accurate.

So in steps the granite surface plate. I don’t have a machinist grade plate, but for what I paid its an incredible degree of accuracy in terms of flat. Why doesn’t everyone have one of these? I applied a thin layer of Dykem hi-spot blue and rubbed the long outside edge of the sashigane .

The ink doesn’t lie, as long as you know how to rub the part without distorting it. If this were your average try square I wouldn’t hesitate to take some metal off. As it is, this is a sashigane, which need to measure precisely 15mm. It came to me from the factory a few thousandths of and inch shy of that in spots, total deviation in width was plus or minus .004″, kind’a poor when you think about it. Thankfully I was able to considerably improve the accuracy by only removing metal where there was already too much. I used a small diamond file on the hardened stainless, I don’t care for hand scraping thin edges.

My normal practice has been using a large machinist reference try square to check my sashigane. But wouldn’t you know it, I took the occasion to look at it on my surface plate a bit, measure it with my good micrometer, it sucks. The best way to check a carpenters square is a marking test, the proof is in the test of the line it lays down.

With sashigane to my satisfaction in hand I got back to task planing out some panels, and just wouldn’t be satisfied by this cheap bosch planer. I know this is a cheap tool, but sometimes…come on, no adjustment at all on the planer knife? And it comes badly askew from the factory in terms of the blades alignment to sole. Haha, as if the sole was in anything you could term alignment.

In machinist parlance, I believe what I’m about to do is called “putting lipstick on a pig”.

I think I voided the warranty.

A shim stack made from shoji paper leveled out the blade relative to the front sole. I had to lap out the front sole to flat with sandpaper on my granite plate so that the blade could be relative to something.

Might I introduce some instability by lowering the quality of fit for the bearing housing? Sure, but this is plastic, and the top of the bearing housing has a rubber bit that holds the bearing down against the bottom plastic housing, so its not like the engineers were struggling for tight tolerances with this anyway.

Other good shim materials .001″ or so: cigarette paper, the foil that poptarts are wrapped in. Get creative here!

In addition I aligned the back of the sole with the front by filing plastic away where the screws held the plate to the bottom housing. Its not perfect, but a damn sight better. This is the first project where I felt I needed the use of a hand planer. It can get me to within a little over  1/32″  of thickness, and has kept my elbow from getting shot pushing my Spiers jointer all day. Now I only push it half the day! The trade off is dust, choking dust that blankets every surface, stirred up by every passing foot fall. And noise, you enter a very closed off little world wearing hearing protection and dust mask.

I made great use of the plane across the grain. My Spiers  jointer was hand scraped against the large granite surface plate I showed earlier, a wonderfully accurate tool if the blade is sharp. I haven’t a bench dog and tail vise to clamp between, so this is a bit of a balancing act.

Now that the panel work is ready I need to sit down and finish detailing my drawing for the piece. Isn’t it about time I learned to use sketchup?

I finally got a chance to finish the drafting for the cabinet piece I’m working on, a rolling shelf unit of sorts made to fit in a tight spot below the 10/10 pitch of the roof in a closet. Up till now I’ve been working to plane the panel work out based on a rougher sketch that lined out some of the critical dimensions.  Sorry, I’m still not great at keeping my drawings in perspective. The rolling cabinet will be taller and skinnier than my drawing would suggest. From the front view above you can tell that it is a pretty simple affair, all 3/4″ paneling joined with dado and wedged through tenons, with through dovetails to join the sides to the bottom. I was limited in most every way by the requirements of the space, which is to say, the height/width/depth/internal arrangement of shelving was not something that could be changed for the sake of aesthetics. However, design constraints often lead to greater creativity, and at least things are made fairly straight forward.

The side view shows the unusual 10/10 slope at the top, which matches the rough opening that follows the roof line at the ceiling. Since this is supposed to allow for clothing storage, its main feature is a clothes hanging rod, and the space needing 36″ below the rod to accommodate most hanging shirts. At the bottom below the dovetails that join the main carcass panels is the skirt boards which hide the caster wheels from sight. I’ve wanted to try more sliding dovetail keys for joining cabinet elements like this, with locking wedge, very cool!

The tenons that join the horizontal shelves to the sides need a bit further thought. I drew them as squares, but I think they’ll look better as golden rectangles, with the long edge parallel to the height of the cabinet. Only the main horizontal shelves are through tenoned, the rest will sit in stopped dado’s so that they can be fitted after the main carcass is assembled.

For shearing strength the bottom section of shelving, as well as the section above the top shelf, will have a rabbited edge along the back to accept 1/4″ tongue and groove pine backing to be nailed on at assembly.

I need to leave the middle section of cabinet with the clothes hanging rod open, but below that I’m planning to cut three stopped grooves that will house a triptych of sliding doors. There is kind of an awkward depth to the compartments that will result, big enough for one pair of shoes  but not two.

Grooving the middle shelf for the sliding doors does present a slight issue with the through tenon on the outermost edge. I have to line it up such that the meat of the tenon coincides with the space between the stopped dado or the act of wedging the tenon would probably split off the bottom half of the tenon cheek. Such is the fun of design!

The sliding doors will be made from the same white ash as the rest of the panel work, with a bookmatched piece of panel sitting in a groove on the rail/stile assembly. These doors are really just a small model of shoji without kumiko, all hipboard.

All that’s left when you finished dimensioning a drawing is to draw up a proper cut list. Once all of the pieces are clearly listed things get much more straight forward in terms of figuring out what to work on.

Which is to say, you hang your drawings up and get to work!

Here I’m resawing the white ash to make the bookmatched panels for the sliding doors. I tried adding a small back bevel on the teeth of my rip saw, one swipe of the file, to get through this hardwood, it seemed to help with edge holding quite a bit and kept me from bemoaning the aggressive softwood tooth pattern I’ve filed on this saw. It seems like every time I sharpen it I make the teeth more aggressive.

Here are the re-sawn boards that will be glued up for the 1/4″ sliding door panels, kinda weird grain pattern, but I like it. Wish it was quarter sawn material!

Here’s a piece of reclaimed douglas fir, old decking, that was resawn for the cabinet back. Look at the quality of this material! The softwood has deteriorated farther in by a long shot compared to the heartwood. Considering its been exposed to the Colorado sun and snow for fifty years I think its held up pretty well! Once again, its rift grain, so I’ll have to leave a bit more room for the cabinet back to swell along its width. My local lumber dealer sells CVG doug fir, but not with this tight grain and heartwood.

Thanks for stopping by, the work dimensioning material continues. I just bought Chris Hall’s “The Art of Carpentry Drawing” Volume II, which deals with Ko-Ko-Gen and hopper joinery, I’m really loving it! So forgive me if I draw this post to a close and go melt my brain with some fun geometry problems and learn to play with my sashigane like a proper carpenter should.

Starting off from where I left you on my last post, staring at the end grain of some old douglas fir decking. In many respects, perhaps not remarkable lumber, but I love the warm glow and even grain, it is something as to character that I look for in other species of timber to favour. This material will be planed down to 1/4″ and given tongue and groove edges with my plow plane.

Stable material like this behaves during sawing! I also have a much better understanding of how much set the saw needs for me to re-saw and leave a nice surface like this.

I recently bought Chris Hall’s “The Art of Japanese Carpentry Drawing, Volume II: Fundamentals of Kokogen”, which I have found to be totally worth the outlay of cash for a bit of scarce knowledge in the English language.  Now I get the whole unit triangle thing, and kept on having these dumb moments where I felt like I was in high school geometry again (although I loved geometry!). Now when reading “The Complete Japanese Joinery” I see something like, use reverse chogen slope, and it seems pretty straight forward, sort of. There’s theory, and then there’s putting it to practice.

Both the edge cut and the face cut of a hopper (splay sided box) can be determined directly with different segments of the unit triangle for the overall rise/run. Unfortunately I still had a bit to learn about what value is used on which side of the sashigane, and marked out the wrong angle for the miter cut on the board edge.

But the layout looks so promising! Meh. Now it just looks wrong. Still some challenge left in executing these diagonal grain cuts with a hand saw.

I didn’t have time to try again, off to lunch with mother and my niece Lilly. This is what I look like close up to a four year old, haha. Childs eye view?

She was by today as well picking up a special delivery. Anyone know what this tool is for?

Slicing some different kinds of domestic truffles! I’ve never tried any of these before, the smell was very rich in an off sort of way.

The grain of this beam is what I think of as rich in an off sort of way. As in, off enough to break the window from swelling and bowing in the middle during a freak 1000 year rain event we had not too long ago. Beautiful patina for some old redwood 6×6 that’s taken fifty years of weather and sun.

Up next, daiku study group day. And what mysteries of joinery might this shachi-sen hold under key?

Well well well, have a look inside the mystery joint from yesterday, sans shachi-sen. Look familiar? I’ve seen this joinery used to great effect by Chris Hall in numerous furniture pieces now (as well as larger structures like a gate), connecting things like table leg rails to the top frame above it. I found it to be quite a challenge! But, seeing as this is the way that I want to hold fast together the matched wooden straightedges for the study group meetup today, I thought it was high time to give it a go.

The pieces to be joined are marked together with marking knife  for the two mortises, ensuring that they will match up when the dovetail keys are installed.

The proportions of the dovetail are largely determined by the width of the chisels that will be used, adjusting the taper of the dovetail key is done by changing the mortise depth.

A lot of the accuracy of the method that I use depends upon accurate depth to the mortise. Perhaps a more forgiving method would employ scribing the dovetail key to the slot that is cut. I layed out half of the dovetail key to make sure the proportions look good, and then made a small depth gauge to match.

The bottom of the dovetail key is 1/2″, the top 1/4″, each slot is the same length at 3/4″. The bit that the dovetail key slides into starts as a 1/4″ wide mortise.

And then the sides are flared out to meet the bottom, forming the dovetail slot. The back of these small sliding dovetails was very tight, I found myself needing a small fishtail chisel, unfortunately I don’t have one that small, so I resorted to a small 1/8″ detail chisel to clean the end grain corners as the cheeks of the dovetail slot were pared.

My dovetail keys, both slightly over sized in every dimension. I made a small saw cut to define the depth of the waist.

And then started splitting off the waste by paring top to bottom.

Now a bit more accurate chisel work to make sure my surfaces are flat. I was pleased not to need a clamp to work these small pieces, though my fingers were at times in danger of poking with the chisel.

The wedge was first fitted to the 1/2″ dimension of the mortise, undergoing a bit of adjustment here and there. By and large most of the fitting took place on the dovetail slot, especially paring in the back corners where I tended to leave too much wood.

I had to push down on the dovetail key pretty hard as I tapped it in with my hammer. I imagine a longer dovetail key would be easier in some respects to install without blowing out the face grain of the mortises. Tricky to fit these! Always a puzzle to figure out where the surfaces are proud.

Each side of the dovetail key was individually fitted to its respective slot, so everything had to be labeled or its a fools progress. With the dovetail keys tapped home the plugs can be planed to fit from the same stock the keys are made of.

I screwed the surface quality of the inside face by sawing too close while making the plug flush. Its always some stupid little error committed after jumping the more difficult hurdles, but that is why this is a practice attempt, I’ll be more mindful in the future. Which is to say, cut proud of the surface and pare with a chisel. Make your mama proud of your work!

And how about we throw a locking wedge in there for full effect. This would be the full expression of the joinery application, and is what I plan to use to join the carcass to the bottom skirt of the cabinet piece I’m working on. I eyeballed the taper and transferred marks across the top of one piece, though the marks could also be brought across the interior surfaces once the pieces are separated.

Definitely locked together, and easily demountable. Is it worth it to join pieces together this way as opposed to screws which are cheap and easily employed? I don’t know, but it sure is fun! You have to do work that you are satisfied with, and I for one will always seek to improve my technique.

The broadaxe I ordered from Highland Woodworking finally arrived after a short backorder, and what a beauty! My brother bought this for me as a gift, he knew that I was in the market looking for one. I thought I’d wind up getting some rusticle on ebay that belonged to an old tie hacker or the like, to have a new tool of this quality is wonderful. And quality it is, the steel holds a keen working edge, even through the knots on the pine around here (ponderosa, lodgepole).

I decided that a right hand scissor grind would be the best fit for what I want to do with it, namely hew square timbers. I know from watching Youtube videos that if you want to get serious about hewing large beams there are much broader and heavier axes out there. I played around with it for as long as my forearms would bear on some short sections of log I use as cribbing, no material to work as of yet…bummer, because there’s real pleasure and joy in hewing work, and its faster than sawing beams with my maebiki-oga. Now if I get a log with excessive butt flare I can square it down a bit and make it more reasonable to saw. Now if I only had an adze…haha.

I put the plow plane to work cutting the tongue and groove on the backing for my piece of cabinet work.

I couldn’t get a good shot of the tongue cutting blade. What I have managed to show is the poor shaving escapement. Veritas, who makes this plane, include a shaving deflector with every tongue cutting blade. So I have three of these little deflectors that fit in the depth stop on the right side of the plane and seem to be very little help, not sure what they were thinking there. But if you take a sufficiently thick shaving it does tend to jump free of the plane body and keep from tangling up.

I processed the tongue and groove on all of the pine for the cabinet back, though I’ve since made a design change and will need to re-saw a bit more.

I’m using miters on the edges of the dovetails that connect the bottom shelf to the sides, so I thought I better give the joint a practice try.

Now I have to through dovetail across the width of these white ash panels, no easy task, especially when the panel is 80″ long and you can’t clamp it vertically to saw the tails. I’ve been practicing my dovetailing technique with the board leaning diagonally on a low saw horse, we’ll see how accurate I can be in an difficult sawing position. I spent several hours making up story sticks. Idiot sticks! There’s one for the elevation and two for each of the plan views. In the photo above I’m using one to gauge the needed panel width so I can set my large kebiki gauge.

There was a bit of damage to one of the panels that I wasn’t able to remove when planing to thickness, so I decided to lay in a patch.

The low angle block plane and shooting board ensure that the edges of the patch are jointed square.

I then used a plunge mortising bit in my electric router to take out most of the waste. I’ve been making a very conscious effort with this piece to use all of my power tools to their maximum ability to save me time. It’s still taken probably sixty hours or so for me to dimension all of the material (maybe 80, I didn’t keep track), and I’m feeling the lack of a planer and jointer. Unfortunately Chris Hall’s blog “thecarpentryway” has me convinced that good machines only exist in far and away places such as Germany and Japan, and they don’t export easily. Maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but I know enough about machine tools today not to want to spend my money easily for a big box store machine that will never be capable of decent accuracy and can’t handle the sizes of half of the material I need to process.

The grain match for the patch way okay, but I missed on the colour. Looks cool! Looks hopefully like I give a shit about what I’m making.

Here I have the elevation story stick clamped to one side of the panel. I transferred all of the marks and then brought a line square across with my sashigane. After clamping the story stick to the opposing side I checked that all of the marks lined up with the square, to make sure that my initial line at the bottom was truly square. When you play around with the sashigane a bit you’ll notice that how you hold it does have an effect on accuracy, and I can see why I might want a really large try square that could give more consistent registration on the edge of the board.

Trimming to my bottom line that will take the through dovetails with a low angle block plane and edge block clamped to avoid blowing out the corner.

I finished today with marking the mortises that house the shelf tenons. I’ve done another piece of cabinet work with through tenons on the shelving, but not a wedged tenon. So when it came time for me to decide on the dimensions and placement of these wedged tenons it occurred to me that they need to be wedged against the edge grain of the mortise, not the side grain. I say that because I did a search online for examples of this technique, and found plenty of examples where a wider tenon was used and wedged such that it would expand against the side grain of the panel, a sure recipe for splits. Thus we arrive at these small little tenons placed closer together. And would you guess who I found searching online using this technique? Chris Hall building a bookshelf….

More along the lines of, “A difference that makes no difference is no difference”. I recently received a set of bits for my brace from my father, most of them look never to have been used, so its like having a brand new antique. But I wanted to compare the speed of the brace compared to a cordless electric drill for drilling the waste on my cabinet side mortises. Well, no difference really. Not in speed, I do find it easier to drill a hole where I want it without a bunch of drift compared to twist and Forstner drills. The obvious advantage of the brace is being able to work quite carefully and deliberately.

I also compared chopping the mortise purely by chisel or first drilling as much of the waste as possible. Interestingly my speed was also almost exactly the same. The difference was in ease, that to be fast chisel mortising requires a good deal more sustained effort that paring back to the line on a mortise after drilling. Do the math too, nine minutes a mortise, twenty-two mortises. I drilled the mortises.

That said, I don’t regret all of the chisel mortising I’ve done. That practice is simply indispensable to developing the smooth technique that leads to speed and accuracy. And there is still work that I would chisel mortise, such as the blind mortises on shoji stile (though I drill a single hole for kumiko mortises in the rail/stile).

My knowledge of how to use this router for accurate work to the line is still quite limited. As opposed to trying to set up my straight edge as a fence and possibly botch the cosmetic stopped dado for the shelf side I stayed behind the line and used the router to remove the bulk of the waste and deck the bottom surface. By the way, the incremental adjustment on this ryobi router, not made to try hitting tolerances of .004″.

Used my widest chisel to chop back to the line, this White Ash works quite nicely by chisel.

Here is the connection for the top shelf, stopped dado on either end. Because I went ahead and cut this shallow cosmetic dado I’ll have to mark directly off of it and cut the outside edges of the top shelf back to the shoulder line before I can get it seated in the cabinet side to mark the tenon locations. Even though I have a story stick made up for these mortises I’m still marking directly to produce the tenons.

I considered trying to rig up some kind of diagonal workbench to saw these dovetails from above, but had already cut the top miter on the cabinet side and some joinery up there that I did not want to risk chipping an edge on the ground. So I cut my tails in two steps like a tenon, starting first from the inside face.

There was a time where I would have knifed every surface of the joint, sawn wide by a margin and then pared painstaking back to the line. Now I use ink and saw directly to the line because I can actually see what the hell I’m doing and get better fits to boot.

My trestles are high enough that I finished the cut sitting beneath the work.

This is a good fret saw and it was worth every penny. Instead of saying it was expensive, how about saying it cost its worth?

Transferring the tails to the pin board was worrying to me right up until the point I came to do it, and had just enough room. The edge of my paning beam which the pin board is clamped to was jointed flat and square to the face, and did a good job of flattening the slight cup of the panels (The humidity in my shop is a wild affair at the moment with the change of the seasons).

More ink for finishing layout of the pin board. One mistake I make more than any other is cutting the wrong side of the line for the pin.

Lets see some good technique with dozuki noko, index finger pointed and laying flat across the top. It hurt the tendons of my hand to do this at first, but I’m glad I stuck it out. Its too easy with a club grip to push the saw too hard in the cut. I care much less about where along the length of the handle the saw is held, the grip is everything.

And of course, the proper way to end a long day is patching a cut on the wrong side of the line…It does take skill to cut such a thin patch with the saw, but this is not one I’m going to brag about.

Now, this is something I’m making for the house, its not a commission, so I can see it as a piece of skill development and lavish my time and attention. But it has got me to thinking about the economics of it all. What does it take to sell fine handcrafted solid wood furniture?

You first have to ask what the size of your market is. No amount of rainbow farting unicorns (thanks for that one Jack Spirko) can produce a market large enough to make a full time living merely because you will it to exist and the work suits your soul. The funny thing about the custom furniture business is that you’re producing something that under normal circumstance you’d never be able to afford. Perhaps something that you’ve never even looked at or seen available in a store. In my case I don’t even know anyone that owns a well made piece of cabinetry I didn’t make. Its not just every day that one wonders into a fine furniture show or gallery. So then why is this desire to make furniture so prevalent among woodworkers, why is it not expressed as the desire to weave baskets or the like?

Part of it comes down to the tools. I know for myself, thinking back on my teenage years constantly perusing tool catalogues, dreaming up wish lists for the perfect shop, it was really apparent that the tools held value, that there is an innate value present. And the prices bear that out, do they knot? Price quite often correlates to value, but that is not to say that most of the work we want to do can be accomplished with tools of more modest origin, I prove that every day with my tool set. But what I’m getting at is that craftsmanship in present society often develops as an aspirational search for personal catharsis, one available with modest means and honest hard work.

Perhaps that belies the number of people I know have tools far to good for their skill, but that is all to the good, is it not? I’d much rather somebody buy the tool that can appreciate it but not use it, to take care of it and one day lovingly pass it on, than see the tool not made at all.

The real revolution in carpentry is what is produced in an individual around ethic. And I think to articulate this it is easiest to refer to the prime directive and ethics of permaculture. Namely:

A)We must take responsibility for our lives and those of our children.

1)Care of earth.

2)Care of people.

3)Return of surplus.

I’d love to explore a bit further how permaculture relates to carpentry, what you might consider a sustainable permaculture business.

Thanks for stopping by today, a fine and snowy Thanksgiving in the rocky mountains of Colorado.

Over the past two days I’ve continued working on my closet cabinet, starting with cutting the pins on the bottom of the cabinet carcass.

Before the fitting for the dovetails I pared by hand to the line on the mitered edges. Although I managed to pull off this task with accuracy it certainly wouldn’t hurt to make up a 45 degree paring block that would act as a miter jack and guide the chisel.

Here is the first set of dovetails coming together, no problems yet.

The second set had to be put together with taps of a hammer. I’m wondering if I should lighten the fit a bit, because I know it may be too tight when the glue swells the joints slightly. I’m nervous about the assembly of these dovetails because both sets will have to go together at the same time to be clamped properly, I’ll be moving at light speed for glue up, which leaves too much opportunity to start hitting shit with a heavy hammer when the glue locks half way. Have you been there before?

Ugh…too much turkey. What is it with people going to more than one thanksgiving? Forgive me, I had to have a lie down by the fire. Thankfully I have a nice glass of whiskey to fortify my health after sitting before the cornucopia.

Anyway, if you’re not asleep yet from too much food I can continue telling the tale of this cabinet joinery. With the dovetails finished and satisfied with the fit I finished the stopped rabbit on the side panels that houses the cabinet back. I still have to finish the mortises, but that will happen after the tenons are scribed.

For the corresponding through rabbit on the bottom panel I pulled out my skew rabbit plane. This plane can cut cross grain rabbits, but I wish it had an actual knife to score the grain in front of the cutting edge as opposed to the wheel knife. Its a great plane though, good for batch cutting kumiko tenons. I just wish I knew about the Japanese version of this plane before buying the Veritas.

Stopped dado present much more of a challenge. The alignment of the guide rods on my electric plunge router is a joke, I won’t trust it to plunge cut without wobble, so its back to the hand tools. I ran into the problem of cutting square sided grooves with my router plane when making my fuigo. A factory fence for Veritas’ router plane is less than fifteen bucks, but it looks so insubstantial I decided to rig up a home made version.

In addition I used a stop at the end of the work to keep me blowing through the grain at the end of the dado.

Three small grooves 3/8″ for three small sliding doors.

And then finished the top with the grooves that house some of the internal carcass shelving. Its starting to look a bit more organized, maybe you can get an idea what the finished piece will look like. Unfortunately the joinery on the bottom is not finished yet either, it still needs the mortises cut on the bottom for the keyed sliding dovetail that hold the skirt boards on the bottom. The skirt boards are only there as a cosmetic addition to hide the caster wheels the unit will roll on.

For tonight no worries of ethics and sustainability, enjoy yourself and the people around you.

Well friends, to your health. Stay warm!

If you’re a newer reader, please consider subscribing to my blog by plugging in your email on the upper right of the page.

With my best wishes,

Gabe

Hi Folks! Back for more joinery on the cabinet piece, this time working on the middle shelf dados that house the sliding doors. I’ve been nursing a cold for the past couple of days, and just got through fixing my truck which had broken down again. The truck was an easy fix, two new batteries, just throwing a bit of money at the problem. The cold is harder, and I’ve been walking around in a bit of a daze.

Before I had taken off for Thanksgiving I finished the grooves in the photo above, working through an almost-knot with heavy reversing grain. To get through with out tearing the side walls to bits I used a chisel to score the line and a bunch of relief cuts along the length.

My home next to the shop, “Challenger”, haha. Just what am I a challenger for? If this were farther north I’d be a challenger for the Darwin award, these travel trailer are not meant for the winter.  An RV has all of the downsides of living on a small boat without the romance of wind and water, though the wind does rock it quite violently from time to time. I should say a small shack would be a lot better if it had a small wood stove in it, too bad everything is illegal these days. Heck, this trailer is technically illegal for the length of time its sat here. Ever shared my fun of living in one of these? Its a learning experience, I assure you, if for no other reason that everything constantly breaks. Entropy is a cold bitch.

Lets review how it fits the three ethics of permaculture.

Care of earth:

Piece of landfill trash in twenty years, every component made to maximum cheapness. The mice seem to like it though, haha. Care of mice? I think not…

Care of people:

We’ll, if it were well made it would be suitably habitable. Back to things constantly breaking though, and the extra margin of expense shopping for parts at ‘RV’ stores where everything costs 20% more than for a conventional home. So not only do you end up with a rodent magnate, but a home where you’re constantly smacking your head on something.

Return of Surplus:

Here I suppose you could throw together a composting toilet (bucket and sawdust) in and at least you meet return of surplus as an individual. If you’re lucky you have a septic hookup, not so lucky is a truck that comes to drain the shit holding tank, running a log distace on diesel, to be disposed of by a local public sanitation facility. The trailer is then really only as good as the systems that you build up around it to service it. An advantage of readily accessible plumbing makes it reasonable to retrofit a greywater system, too bad its illegal. I should point out that humanure composting is also illegal here.

In the end, lets just say that it is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.

Rabbited the back edge after cutting each edge to the shoulder line, which was done so that the shelf would fit in the cosmetic dado cut in the cabinet sides, allowing the tenons to be scribed directly from the mortises.

Scribing was easy, though I continually find myself wishing that my marking knife was thinner and more maneuverable in tight spaces.

The world cast in monochrome from the recent winter storm.

Chopping back to the shoulder line after cutting the cheeks of the tenons.

And the fit was good. I still haven’t decided weather to leave the tenons protruding or to cut them flush with the cabinet side after wedging.

It came time to make the saw kerfs in the tenons for the wedges and I had one of those dumb confused moments where I realized I hadn’t considered the difficulty of making these cuts. I wish I had a nice thin azebiki noko. My dozuki worked, but it was difficult.

Yesterday morning I felt like shit, really under the weather, so I didn’t want to exert myself too much, only a half day in the shop making a clothes drying rack for my brother. I first saw one of these racks watching a cool BBC programme called “Coal House”, a recreation by three Welsh families of life as 1927 coal miners.

All heating and cooking happened at a central coal fired stove, and with the often damp weather there it was important to be able to dry clothes in doors.

I feel very acutely the poorly made nature of things around me, with the cold bitch entropy entering again to break the clothes dryer. But the problem is the solution, right? The solution then is not to need the clothes dryer or the energy it consumes.

I found a seller in the UK on etsy making these, but with birch ply for the curved sides. I used white ash instead, and some leftover red oak flooring for the hanging rods. A 1/4″ round over bit in my router table featured prominently in the making. I had some heavy eye bolts lying around that the rack hangs from, and can be raised and lowered by pulling on the rope, getting the clothes up out of the way and in the best heat by the ceiling.

And lastly the appliance in its context by the lovely little woodstove, ready to dry some clothes with renewable heat energy.

I do some interesting work these day, you never know what might need to be fabricated. Here is a little press I whipped up the other day for hash.

I finished fitting the mechi/stub tenons on the top shelf before flying out to New York to spend some time with a good friend of mine, Julian Rose, a Flutist.

I got into the city in time to catch a concert of his in a small performance hall behind Beethoven Piano’s on 58th street, right below central park. I was struck with the many uses of wood in this space to achieve an acoustically desirable space.

Grimaldi’s pizza the next day, the BEST.

The next day Julian and I drove up to a couple of flute makers just outside Boston. Alan Weiss, the head of Wm. S. Haynes gave us a tour. They’ve been in business 125 years now, and have machinery that goes all the way back to the beginning. Most of the work is in gold and silver, really more of a jewelers trade than the work of machinists.

Here’s a drop forge at Haynes from before 1900, still used for certain gold flute parts, one at a time.

The craftsmen were very content in their individual work, very knowledgeable, not merely a cog in the production process. I used to do a bit of flute repair work, it stirred something in my heart to see so many with great skill. On the floor around their factory was piles and piles of gold and silver shavings, sort of the equivalent of a wood shop with planing shavings, definitely the kind of shop that I would like to work in, not some cold sterile factory.

From left to right: Julian Rose – flutist, Gabe Dwiggins, and Alan Weiss – Flutist

In in New York city through the rest of the week, visiting some friends, and this is what you might find in the apartment of any aspiring young professional. Now, to be blunt, New York city is an expensive place to live, so these friends of mine are not broke or poor, which would be an acceptable excuse for having cheap furniture.  But the above photo speaks to the ubiquity of poor quality construction in the market today, even among the trendy Brooklyn set.

For a little comparison, here is a piece I ran across in the Asian wing of the met, Ming period Chinese wardrobe with everything so fucking awesome you wonder how we could have descended this far in quality. Lets take a look at some of the details.

Three way miter joints with wedged through tenon.

And the bottom rail to stile connection with birds mouth notch and wedged through tenon. The money I spent at the MET was worth it just to look at this one piece!

And then I ran across a shoin style Japanese room with black lacquered fusuma with gilt paper, and tokonoma on the opposing side that I didn’t photograph. Just really stunning. I mean, I am still stunned and I’m trying to relax drinking a bit of wine back with my friends, not working though. I could have stared at the ceiling in this room for fifteen minutes, the proportioning, the hand plane finish, beautiful!

They also had a lot of period rooms in the American wing, here is a colonial room with a piece of furniture I’d never seen before to the left of the upholstered chair, a fire screen with lamp table. For all the wealth that was on display, this being the home of a well heeled personage, they still lived with the cold in a very present manner, and the furniture reflects that fact.

Here’s a colonial niddy-noddy, a device for winding skeins of yarn and measuring length. I really like the lines on this one, its quite timeless and not over-wrought.

How about a coopered wooden beer mug? This gives me a creative emotion, like..awesome!

And it was new to me to see blind mitered dovetails on American furniture, guess where?

Cabinet legs! I had no idea.

My trip to the MET was an excellent learning experience and it has really changed my view of both Asian and early American furniture making, its so excellent to have seen this stuff in person, even if I wasn’t able to pull out drawers and run my hand over the wood grain.

I took the subway after lunch yesterday down to West 18th street in Manhattan to pay a visit to the legendary woodworkers at Miya Shoji. If you’ve ever searched the term shoji online you’ve run across Miya Shoji right away, their presence looms large in the space around woodworking business and using traditional techniques and tools. The amount of press coverage they’ve received is staggering, but everything was very down to earth when I walked through the door. Chosuke Miyahira’s son is on the left holding that amazing slab of wood as it went out the door, and he was quite happy to talk with me a short while and share a bit of the philosophy that has kept the business working for all of these years. Truly, considering how they work it is nothing short of a miracle. As they say, only in New York City. (But honestly it is not only in the city, we can make this work elsewhere)

He emphasized how they only worked with wood sourced locally, lots of linden, and walnut. Apparently good wood like this is also becoming more scarce in the North East, prices are very high (and customers don’t understand the vagaries of the hardwood lumber market).

Here’s a nice slab of live edged walnut that greets you as you walk through the door. Besides the shoji this was the clearest statement of their design values.

Some cool little lamps that have given me ideas. Apparently they’ve given other stores the same idea and the competition has become increasingly cheap and derivative.

I really liked the proportioning on their shoji elements. Their kumiko mitsuke was especially thin, even on the towering shoji panels that went floor to ceiling in aragumi arrangement, quite daring.

And of course, you need some decent glue for applying shoji paper, and there’s lots of different stuff to choose from, so use what works.

I love how Chosuke Miyahira has this expression in all of the photos. He’s focused on his work, but not necessarily displeased that I’m fanboying out on him here.

Of Note:

1-Work with the local wood available around you.

2-Don’t step on your neighbors turf, that’s just not cool.

3-Its not weather or not you go out of business, its how you go out of business. Every wave has a beginning and an end.

I ended the evening with a great meal and some mochi daifuku from Minamoto Kitchoan up on 5th Av/ 53rd Street, a real treat!

I ended up going back to the MET one more time before leaving for Colorado. Here’s the tokonoma for the shoin style room. Is this alcove pretentiously wide? I wonder about the choice of the gilt paper as well. I love the way this room is presented, but its not a place you can live in. The good design I care about these days has more to do with a self-sufficient life. Where in that is space for a room of display and reception? In the splendor of viewing this room I forgot that the average carpenters house, for his entire family in Edo period Japan, would be about the same size.

I truly enjoyed seeing the re-created early American rooms  with furnishings and nick-nacks, because it gave me a feeling of the people that might have lived then. As a friend of mine has said, its the relation between the subject and the object that matters.

So, while I loved seeing a re-created shoin style reception room, I would get so much more out of the more humble carpenters room from a row house, perhaps with a workspace in one corner, and the furnishings of a lived in space.

Back in the mountains of Colorado I’m awed by a different kind of beauty, one that has you not caring about bad design and life as a poor redneck. There was something greatly compelling and exciting about life in the city, the possibilities of it all, and the youthfulness and affluence. It was a real spin around and half of the time I felt like I could forget about the country and make do with a park…but really no. A man should be able to take a piss when he needs to. The great irony of a completely constructed space for human needs is that it is greatly inhuman.

I finally felt human enough to get back to work on the closet cabinet build. As it turns out I’ve left the panel work alone for long enough to visibly swell in width, the story stick doesn’t lie.  I had planned to attach the bottom skirt that hides the caster wheels with sliding dovetails into the long grain of the panel. It hadn’t occurred to me that as the panels shrink and swell it would be putting constant stress on the dovetails for the skirt corners.

So some re-evaluation followed, obviously the attachment needs to allow for the panel to move freely. Now the sliding dovetail keys are on the short edge of the cabinet, and will be mortised into the panel above with the cross grain to follow the direction of greatest movement in the panel. I had to draw out the various conditions that might occur to see how it would effect the sliding dovetails. I realized that if the panel is to move freely the sachi-sen doesn’t make sense. If I put it in I have to leave the dovetails with a gap either end, and then what is the wedge for if you can’t draw it up tight?

So forget the wedge, it’ll move freely and keep the panel above from splitting in the long run. I’m still not sure about leaving the sachi-sen out, I would have liked to use it. Chris Hall over at thecarpentryway is working on some Ming inspired cabinets and dealing with the support stand attachment to the bottom of the cabinet carcass as well. I hope to learn more as his work progresses.

I spun a new silk line for my sumitsubo,  this one is about half the diameter compared to the one I have in my ink line now. I’m hoping that it will be fine enough for joinery work and timber framing.

Apparently I didn’t forget how cut hand cut dovetails while in NYC, it felt really great to get back to work.

That’s why I’m not called a fastener, or a stapler. Or a nail gun ninja for that matter. My ultimate goal revolves around fast accurate work with sharp edges, be they powered or pushed by hand.

So I set to work making some sliding dovetail rod tenons to join a cabinet skirt to its carcass bottom. The clamp gives the scale, these are pretty small. The dovetail is 1:6 and the tenon 3/8″ thick. They’re small enough that it’s not worth getting a saw out to cut the tenon shoulders. Its fun chisel work, to form dovetails. Give it a try!

I made the rod tenons out of White Oak, a denser wood than the White Ash the skirt is made from. Using a sliding dovetail rod tenon allows for the dovetail to be installed and plugged, and then the rails to be set on to the tenons and pegged. However, I want the room in the mortise for the expansion and contration of the panel work, so I’ll not be plugging the mortise.

I started the mortise and sliding dovetail by drilling as much of the waste as possible.

And then chisel work to pare the end grain to the line, followed by a router plane to clean to depth, where I gave myself five thousandths clearance over the 3/8″ height of the dovetail. The walls of the dovetails I chopped with an undercut as close as I dared by eye.

And then to be followed by a paring block with the correct 1:6 ratio. This is the first time I’ve used a paring block to form the dovetail cheeks and I loved it. Both faster and more accurate, two of the dovetail keys fit well with no further paring.

Basically, everything has to fit perfectly if I expect all of them to slide properly when the skirt is assembled. Layout using story sticks to transfer marks between parts was critical, no measuring from a scale, and using a marking knife. All of the rod tenons were previously fitted to their mortises in the skirt, and thus were unique and needed to be individually numbered to keep everything organized.

After fitting the sliding dovetails I went ahead and drilled, mortised, and pegged the joint, again with Oak.

And then glued the skirt boards together, checking repeatedly for squareness. This is how I left it for the night. I’ll get back into the shop today and have a moment of truth checking the fit, I’m excited! Did I mention the sole purpose of the skirt board is to hide the caster wheels on the bottom of the cabinet carcass? Its an extra day of work to make the attachment this way, but I’ve learned a tremendous amount about this connection which I hope to use on pieces in the future.

I hope everyone is staying warm by the fire, getting ready to celebrate some holiday cheer. Can you believe the new year is so close at hand? As a blogger I have an easily searchable index of what I’ve accomplished over the past year, and even so it feels like the past year has just swept by. I think of what I want to accomplish in the next year and there are so many things that are unknown, but that is part of the joy in life. So I wish you, dear reader, many exciting possibilities in the time to come as well.

Assembling major parts of a cabinet that you’ve spent months working on doesn’t need to be stressful if you get everything you might need ready before hand. Clamps already the right length, the right hammers and scrap block, a wet rag in easy reach, and a way to check for square and adjust after the joint is together.

I’ve got to keep my writing today brief, its literally freezing in my trailer this morning and typing lets my hands get too cold. I want to get into the shop and warm up sawing or planing some shit.

Even having everything at the ready I glued up only one side at a time of the dovetailed bottom.

Moving down to some low saw horses the shelf panels were set into their mortise/groove.

And the dovetails glued and tenons driven home. If you’re thinking, thats an odd looking cabinet, you’re right. Its a built in, made to fit an odd shaped opening into a bedroom closet that happens to be beneath the 12/12 pitch of the roof, thus the angle on the top of the cabinet. Lots to come together here, a very focused few moments of getting it all together.

All of these pieces have been finish planed and worked with a card scraper, so there’s the extra challenge of not wanting to ding or scratch too much. In the lower shelf area you can see there are further grooves for the rest of the shelving, and three parallel grooves on the front of the cabinet for the sliding doors.

With the glue drying I cut my wedges for securing the mechi (stub tenons) from the same white oak I used to peg the sliding dovetail rod tenons. Last time I used a wedged tenon I glued the wedges, this time no glue at all, just pure joinery. What am I spending all this time on cutting complicated joinery if I can’t trust it to hold without glue? Well, I’ll find out…

Make sure to make your wedges plenty longer than you’ll need. I needed mine to be, theoretically, 3/4″. I cut them out at 1-1/8″ length, and they drove deeper than I thought they would.

I started all of the wedges at the same time. It seems to be important to  drive them down relatively equally .

Just how hard are you supposed to pound these in there anyway? I pounded them in with the clamps on out of fear that the hammer blows might cause the cabinet side to back off the shelf.

I don’t have a flush cutting saw so I used a couple thicknesses of paper to hold the saw blade slightly above the surface and keep the teeth from scratching up the panel.

A few passes of the block plane flushed them up with the panel.

With the dovetails planed flush I slid on the skirt’s sliding dovetail keys.

And slid it over into position with taps of my genno.

Now its ready for the rest of the shelving, the tongue and groove pine backing, sliding doors, and casters on the bottom to get things rolling. You know the one thing I completely forgot in the design? Some type of handle or pull so that the unit can be moved in and out of its opening….I spent last night looking at lots of hardware, too many choices. I like flush ring pulls like you might find on a boat, I could also see a forged iron ring pull. Any ideas of what would look good? Leave me a comment below, thanks!