Gateway (70)

The big 7-0 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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Working on the main doors for the past few days. I wanted to show a quick video of the super surfacer in normal operation, that is, with auto-return:

The doors were made from some quite nice stock, but it wasn’t completely perfect material. Here, a knot was excavated and patched in one of the stiles:

You can see a little pin knot to the upper right of the picture, which I chose to leave. I don’t fill every knot, just the ones that are loose or punky. Thankfully, most of the pieces I’m using on this project are pretty decent and don’t require much patching.

I was enjoying my Yokoyama VAR (Vacuum Arc Remelted) White steel plane today, which I have been using for final clean up here and there as necessary:

That plane required so much work to set up, and the chip breaker was junk, however it has a great cutting feel and works pretty well as a single blade plane.

After planing, trimming the stile ends, and chamfering, the door frame can start to come together:

Let’s not forget the panel assembly and rails:

One stile is drawn up first:

Then the other:

Then it is a matter of masking tape application, mixing epoxy and driving in the wedges:

A look at the side after wedging:

The other door also completed, save for hardware installation:

Some copper work appeared today as well:

These are for wrapping the lower ends of the rear support posts, hikae-bashira.

All for now- thanks for visiting! Up next is, you guessed it: post 71