The next stage was the processing of the posts for the lantern head, which were approximately 1″ square. I say approximately, as they are to be re-shaped into rhomboids in cross section ultimately, so as to meet the sill orthogonally. This is the same sort of work as is required in Japanese splayed leg sawhorses, as one example, and I made some mention of this in previous posts about the irregular sloped sawhorse. I’ve also written about it in a Timber framing Journal back issue. anyhow, the first step is getting out the rough stock, and I had some pieces that were nearly the right size, along with a bit of scrap from the window and door shop down the street:
Out came the saw and time for another installment of Sawing for Teens, the ripping hit of a show where studio members can win fabulous prizes:
Here’s the four pieces now rough-sawn:
Then it was time for my old friend Mosaku, all 54mm, to make an appearance:
For some reason or another, I was not, um, firing on all cylinders that day, and after sawing out the pieces and planing to size, I had planed several pieces under size. After a few curses escaped my lips, I went back down the road to the window and door shop to root through their scrap pile once again. I found a few pieces, however the grain was not to my liking in the scrap, which entailed more saw work as I had to extract the desired pieces out of the rough stock on a diagonal and sloping cut orientation. Here we are after the first cut:
And the second cut:
Just one more to go:
At last it’s cut out:
I then repeated that with a couple more post pieces, following with another round of planing to get the posts out of wind, straight, square and, this time, to the required dimension. Then I proceeded to lay out the cuts that will be taken by plane to bring the pieces into their rhomboid sections:
As you can see, the amount to be removed is rather slight in this case, given that the amount of compound splay of these posts is fairly minor.
I then set up a pair of bevel gauges, one to check the angle after I planed down one of the faces to the line, and the other to check after two adjacent faces had been planed:
Here are the four posts now planed to the correct configuration:
They hardly look any different than if they were square!
With the posts planed to shape, I could now lay out the cuts for the end cuts and the tenon shoulders, and commenced trimming the ends:
In the next installment in this series I will show the cut-out of the tenons for the lantern head posts. See you then.