Colgate EALL (11)

My new WP blog  is, after spending 2 hours each of the past three mornings with WP chat support, finally working properly. Links within threads, from post to post, now work, and links to pages found via search engine also land on the correct pages here. Whew! Things were looking grim for a while there and I wondered if the migration was going to be a mistake. It turns out that the WP Beginner article that I used on migrating a blog from Blogger to WordPress had some shortcomings in coding language. WP Beginner, as it turns out, is not actually associated to, or put out by, WordPress. If you contemplate making the same move yourself with your blog, a good place to look at is a site called Bloggertowp.

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In the last post, I put together a couple of transoms, one for the Japanese space, and one for the Chinese space. Next up are a pair of ka-ke-shōji (hanging shōji) for the Japanese room, which will be made with Port Orford Cedar main frames, Black Cherry inner frames, and Yellow Cedar for the lattice, or kumiko. The kumiko is too thin to be put through my surfacer, so each of the pieces was planed clean and to size by hand after initial resawing, jointing and then dimensioning by stationary planer:

Here’s a look at some of the parts as I work my way along the fabrication stream:

Planing of the kumiko was a pleasant time:

A sign of a good outcome from stock prep, and of compliant material. is that your stack of pieces sits flat and tidy:

The cherry frame members required the same prep:

The lattice connects to the inner cherry frame by way of shouldered blind tenons, so after a bit of layout, mortising was done using a 4.5mm (0.177″) hollow chisel:

Further along:

When I first bought the super surfacer a few years back, I remember that a reader expressed the fear that I would lose my hand plane skills as a result of the new toy, however this is not what happens, at least not for me. Though the super-surfacer replaces a lot of labor time in planing pieces, one is still left with pieces which cannot be run through the surfacer, like sticks thinner than 10mm (about 3/8″),  taller than 250mm (10″), wider than 360mm (14″), sticks which are curved, or chamfered, for instance. Chamfers are a notoriously tear-out prone area to plane. One’s planing game therefore has to be keeping up with the super-surfacer if planed surfaces are the goal, and they certainly are for me:

I made a simple jig with a rebate to support piece which were being chamfered:

Latticework is one of those areas where your prep work has to be on the order of +/- 0.002″ or better if you want the laps to be fitting well, not too tight so as to cause pieces to bow when connected, and not so loose that there are gaps. Fortunately, a hand plane is a great tool for doing very precise surfacing, so long as you have the means to measure and constantly check results.

Once the latticework was assembled, I could put it together with the cherry frames and a little glue and clamp festival commenced:

I have a couple of the newest type Bessey parallel clamps I’m trying out.

Afterward, any slight adjustments to the cherry frames were made by plane so as to tune their fit into the dados in the surrounding Port Orford Cedar frame:

After the frames were put together around the lattice assemblies, the last step was to apply shōji-gami. I use a type which is puncture resistant, and this must be held down to the latticework while the glue dries:

Both ka-ke-shōji  are now complete. I’ve got a bunch of video clips to edit and hope to have something out on YouTube in the next few days (er, weeks). Post 12 follows in this thread.

Thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way.