Gateway (23)

Chop, chop, choppin’ on heaven’s door…. That’s a good description for the past couple of days. Pounding on the chisel until my arms gets sore – that sort of good time, you know?

The open mortises are a hair over 8″ deep, and the hollow chisel gets me about 6″ down, so the rest of the way is chopped and pared:

 

The above shows an open mortise in the kabuki. The 24mm timber slick got a good workout, as did my front delts. I divided up the work over a couple of days.

These are roughly cleaned out for the time being – the grunt work is done at least:

The nose pieces were even more onerous, as the open mortises are nearly 20″ long:

Getting there – rough hacking and chopping completed:

Number 2 also through rough cutting of the open mortise:

A while later I had the upper pair of stub tenons mostly roughed out as well:

The other nose to the same stage:

Layout on the posts has led to mortising on the posts:

I think they call it ‘post-modernism’ – hah!

Just up to my armpits in resinous stinky POC chips:

Mortising from both sides left a 3/4″ web in the middle of the 16″ x 2.5″ mortise, a web which I drilled and punched out in short order:

The above picture shows the inside face of the post, which will be met by the kabuki. I made a little note to myself to re-check the layout for the magusa‘s tenon – hence the ‘?’ mark in the middle of the layout for that mortise.

The kabuki has moved along a bit – and it looks like time for clean up too:

 

All for today – I hope 2015 turns out to be a great year for one and all. Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way. Onward to post 24