Screen Play (26)

I am down to a myriad of relatively minor tasks, so today’s post kind of hops around a bit. One job was to finish up the mortises to hold the grill bars, or kōshi, which I had previously roughed out with my router. I took a scrap piece of bar, and trimmed a rebate on its end, with a dead-square ledge – this will act as a fitting and marking piece for the mortises:

The bars have an angled chamfer on their front faces, and the mortise is to fully house the bars, thus I am making a mortise with little angled returns in the corners. I insert the bar in the mortise and mark out around it:

Then I have to chisel out, staying inside of the pencil lines:

A completed pair of mortises:

With a bar fitted:

Another task was chamfering the main frame parts. I had a lot of indecision around the chamfering, trying to decide between using a faceted chamber or a rounded one. I had already decided to use a faceted non-45˚ chamfer on the sill piece, however that didn’t seem quite right for the other frame members as they are curvilinear. Eventually I settled on doing rounded chamfers on all the curved parts and the lower cross piece, and leaving the sill as it was. Then it was a matter of deciding how large a chamfer to put on, an aspect I am still contemplating. I have made an initial run down the outside of the frame with a 3/16″ curved chamfer, and am trying to decide if I want to go further.

After the chamfer of that outside arris, which I accomplished with my router, I tidy up the points of intersection at the upper frame joints, using a file:

Another minor job was finish planing the lower cross piece, after the mortises on it had been completed:

Now, on to the feet. Last time I fitted them they came to about 1cm from fully together and then stopped. I figured out the points of interference and made the necessary adjustments. Then I fitted the pieces back up and marked out for the mortises, which, like the ones for the grill bars detailed above, are fully housed with accommodation in the corners of the mortise for the chamfers of the connecting piece:

Time for another fit up:

This time they close up, almost perfectly:

I needed to trim a small amount off the interior shoulders to seal the deal:

Fitted up again – this time the fit has nothing to worry about, and this view is from the floor looking up:

I’m pleased with the way these feet look in terms of their profile and the way the joints came out:

I need to next mark out for the peg on the tenon which will lock the foot in place to the frame, but my hollow mortising chisel is a half an hour drive away so that will wait for a while.

Next up: a little work on the frame members with a spokeshave:

I can’t reach everywhere with the spokeshave however, so I have to resort to a little filing and even, god help me, a minor amount of sanding in the nooks and crannies. The corners are starting to come along fairly well at this point: