Post 35 in an ongoing series describing the design and construction of a kabukimon, a type of Japanese gate. This is a project for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Post 1 in this series can be found here if you’d like to start at the beginning. Each post links to the next at the bottom of the page.
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Today the weather warmed into the 40’s (˚F), and brought with it a lot of rain, which made the streets into ice rinks. The hardest part was getting to and from the car. Anyway, made it to the shop for a few hours of blundering about.
I started by cleaning up yesterday’s infill work on the under-surface of the kabuki. When done, it came out pretty well I thought:
A couple of photos looking directly down at the infill:
The color gives it away a little more in the pic directly above.
An end grain view of the umeki:
That pretty much wraps up the work on that beam, save for trimming the tenons to length, cleaning up the end walls of the slot mortises, and cutting the trenches for the shachi-sen to be fitted later.
Then I moved on to completing the mortising work on the main posts for the stretchers, or nuki as they are termed in Japanese. The drilling was followed by some chop out and then paring. I tried a bit more filming to see how it would go:
The chisels were a notch below optimal sharpness, but they did the job. My sharpening stuff is at home while the weather has been so cold and the shop sort of like an ice fortress. Reminded me to take the chisels back with me at the end of the day.
All for now, thanks for dropping by. Post 36 is up next.