Gateway (71)

Post 71 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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Today was occupied by office work for a chunk of the morning, followed by a meeting with the metal fabricator, followed by some shop time.

Work today centered on completing the main doors. Yesterday’s glue up left me with tenons to trim, masking tape to pull, edges to plane. Then I gave both doors three coats of Sirca Waxy Impregnator, and followed that by layout and mortising for the door hinges. Here’s one fitted:

A look through the hinge’s fixing pin hole; with the hinge all the way in its hole is aligned thereby giving clear passage for the pin:

After the hinges were fitted, a round of clean up:

As you can see the mortise partially occludes the though tenon, however given that the mortise tapers on all sides, it doesn’t actually remove too much material from the tenon overall, so there is only a modest loss of strength I think:

On to door 2 with the same process:

Towards the end of the day I was able to get one door complete as far as hardware mounting on the front face:

A closer look at one corner of the door:

Another view:

Some more sheet copper work was completed today by the metal fabricator, namely the main post lower end covers, and the 8′ long peaked main roof panel over the kabuki (beam), and it looks like most of the copper sheet work will be done by week’s end.

That’s it for this round. Perhaps we’ll see you next time, at post 72.