Welcome to part five in this build of a Japanese freestanding screen, or tsuitate.
After completing the template routing in the previous post, I let the wood settle for a few days. There was a modicum of movement, but it was slight so I didn’t make any further adjustments to the stock.
The next step was to prepare a jig for cutting those joints. While the jig is simple enough, the devil is in the details, as they say, and I spent quite a while thinking about the configuration of the jig. The base of the jig is dadoed to accept the side panels:
The function of the two windows on one side piece will become apparent soon enough. Here’s the jig with both sides fitted and the router base plate, also dadoed to fit the sides, parked on top:
The interior of the jig is further shimmed with a couple of pieces of MDF, and the windows on one side copied over:
The first task was to deck the ends of the joints flat:
The windows allow me to clamp the piece directly and serve to align the reference lines on the stick with their correspondent lines on the jig:
Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fah-lah-lah la-…. okay, on with the pictures:
The surface is now cleaned off:
I marked out the tenons, and then used a ryoba to trim the waste pieces away. First the crosscut:
Then the rip:
The tenon is now roughed out:
As I will be using the router to define the tenon more precisely, I didn’t worry too much about cutting especially close to the line. The work went quickly.
The configuration of the jig is such that I can locate the router support plate to various positions – in the next step I have put the plate on the end of the jig at a 45˚ angle:
The first round of cuts to define the tenon:
Both legs now have their tenons defined:
A few more steps and the stub tenons are established:
Another view:
These joint’s aren’t even halfway cut out yet, so I hope the reader might put off jumping to conclusions as to what joint I am using and how it will come out in final form.
That’s all for today- thanks for visiting! — > on to post 6
Hi Chris, looks like another great project, and thanks for revealing some of the details behind your router jig setup. I was wondering if you could explain a little about how you cut the tenon and stub tenons so precisely using the jig…. do you use an edge guide running along the edges of the support plate?
Thanks,
Jon
Jon,
IIRC, I used an edge guide along the plate, yes. Thanks for asking!
~C