Gateway (48)

Post 48 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.
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Didn’t get to the shop until noon today, as there were innumerable ‘office’ related tasks to take care of. Tax season is just around the corner after all.

When I did arrive, I found the shop had warmed to a pleasant 0˚ Celsius, which didn’t seem too bad at all. I shelved plans to work on the final two framing elements – namely the kasagi – next, thinking it would be better to wait until the tooling for that was here. It was shipped today so I’ll have it early next week.

Instead, I decided to process the mortises on the left side flanking post and wall post of the gate for the half-dovetailed battens which will carry the paneled portion of the gate.

With the mortises done, you might say I then found my groove:

I used the Makita groover to rough out a 12mm groove, then used my router to take the opening out to target width and depth. The width was nominally 0.6250″ (5/8″), however I decided to keep the groove a hair shy of that:

I managed to achieve much the same outcome with the grove on the other stick:

The panels are currently at 1.645″ or so, and will need a finish planing yet. My plan is to leave the parts with a slight interference and then I can pre-compress the grain on the panel edge to get a close fit. Looks like I have about 1/100″ to work with on each face of the panel.

Once the ends of the grooves were cleaned out with a chisel, these two sticks are done save for finish planing and chamfering – – and the flanking post will need those sliding dovetail mortises on the backside as well:

A look at a couple of the mortises of the half dovetails and wedges:

And a look at the two sticks from the upper end:

Then it was time to prep some stock for the doors, which occupied me until the end of the day:

All of the short pieces in the above photo comprise the rails and battens for the main door. I managed to obtain all of them from the short chunks which were mistakenly cut by the mill in Oregon so many months back. It was good to find a use for those chunks. I have also milled out the side door rails and stiles, along with the main door inner hanging stiles. That leaves just the hinge side stile on the main doors to resaw joint and plane, which will be on the salte for tomorrow along with whatever else I can dream up.

All for this round – hope to see you next time! Next: post 49