This job sure entails a diverse range of items, from architectural millwork, sliding doors, to furniture, to windows, and so forth. It’s fun in that respect.
I’ve been working on the round window for the Japanese alcove. I considered various ways to make a round window, and in the end decided that glue up from solid segments made the most sense. I chose a decagonal arrangement of pieces as a compromise between grain straightness and overall complexity.
After gluing up pieces in a couple of stages, I had two half-rings of 5 pieces each. These were then tuned along their abutting ends with a hand plane:
Once that was satisfactory, I could proceed with the glue up:
All of the joints have an internal spline.
With the glue up done, I proceeded to process the cuts to make a round, lipped window frame:
A bit of table sawing with the rip blade cut away the remainder of the waste and I cleaned up the surfaces of the flange by plane:
Then some additional smoothing work to finish the cut out out phase:
On goes the finish, in the end 5 coats applied and hand rubbed between in total:
It’s nice to use Enduro Var as it allows me to get several coats on per day.
The spline ends are exposed, but fairly discrete, so I doubt they will be noticed:
The cusped window is done, and has been waxed:
The alcove has a floor on each side. The alcove proper has a single piece black cherry slab, now into its 4th coat of finish:
The other side of the alcove, which features the round window and the staggered shelves, has an avodire floor, and is a glue-up of 4 pieces:
The glue up produces a panel which appears to have a thicker edge than it actually does. I couldn’t find wide 8/4 avodire, and the widest I could find in 4/4 was 14″ or so, hence my approach to the fabrication of this piece.
The black cherry toko-bashira, or alcove post, is done and into the finishing process:
The transom for the Japanese room, or ranma, is done:
The wenge frame corners were kerfed on the milling machine for a pair of splines each:
I used a conventional woodworking 3-wing slot cutter, however this got me thinking that it will be nice at some future point to obtain some larger slotting cutters and arbor for the mill.
A closer look – the slot cutter is nice as it leaves a crisp flat-bottomed cut:
The work was accomplished by 2 fixturing positions and two angle settings of the rotary table.
Another look:
The splines are their own bit of entertainment to make, as they are quite thin (3/32″/ 2.4mm). They came out well and were glued in soon after the slotting was done:
This unit will be installed between a pair of plant-on posts:
Another view – I hope you agree that the avodire and wenge work well together:
There have been some design modifications to the toko-waki (the flanking portion of the alcove which has the round window and staggered shelves. The window has been moved up in height and the shelves dropped down, so the current arrangement now looks like this:
Those shelves will be one of the next items I tackle, along with the framing for the sliding doors behind the round window. Lots to do yet, and installation is slated for the end of this month.
Thanks for visiting the Carpentry way and hope to see you again soon! Post 15 follows.
Hi Chris
The round window frame looks really good. I like that you are able to see the splines.
Will the avodire and wenge unit have some shoij paper (spelling?) in the two open sections?
Brgds
Jonas
Hi Jonas. The ranma will have open sections alternated with the panels, no paper.
Chris
The new site seems very good. l had a lot of catching up to do.
Joyeux Quatorze Juillet !
Tom
Tom,
glad you found your way here, and happy July 14th to you as well!
Looking great, Chris! That cherry beam is going to look awesome.
Thanks Brian, it seems to be getting there.
On a minor note: beams are horizontal members, posts stand upright
Ah, I had it in my mind that it was going horizontal, now I see that is the case as I reread and see the highlighted part. Doh’
Yeah, if you look at the last picture in post above, you’ll see the alcove post just a little to the right.
Getting to be punch list time on this job…
I typo’d above, should say ‘I see that is *not* the case. Any who, thanks for pointing that out and good luck with the next phase of install.
Working on the Chinese room window lattice presently. Thanks for the follow up.
The cusped window is really nice. Those flowing lines are really appealing. It has an Art Nouveau feel to it.Making all the pieces match looks like quite a job.
In the picture of the ranma, there seem to be a couple of Festool boxes in the background. What do you think of those tools? Would you recommend them?
Roland,
I’m appreciate of your comments about the window. I’m looking forward to seeing how it looks when installed.
My portable power tools are comprised of a bunch of Festool, some Makita and some Hitachi. I was an early adopter of Festool, but have not become an obsessed collector of that company’s products. They sell their products in a sort of sets and accessories sort of approach, and this encourages many folks tendency to purchase all of a set. I’ve managed not to succumb to that.
In general, they offer improvements over most other brands, especially in areas like dust collection at the tool, and have good ergonomics. Are they perfect tools? No -certainly, various improvements could be made in some of their products.
I make the most use of their two smaller routers. The base castings are not dead flat, for starters. Their system for attaching copy rings (template guides) is poor. Their edge guide is something I never use, preferring an aftermarket product. But, faced with the need in the near future to replace my worn-out OF1400 router, looking around the market place I still don’t see anything I would choose instead of it. Mafell is appealing, but the significant price difference, here in the US especially where there is but one distributor, makes it hard to justify.
I use Festool’s Rotex 125 sander for finish coating work, and it works pretty well. I make occasional use of their jigsaw, and I would say it is quite good, certainly on a par with the Bosch, which is otherwise the industry standard.
The rest of my Festool boxes are actually storage containers of various kinds. Some of these i nearly never use, others, like the Sortainers, I use daily. They are fine, but there are other good products of a similar nature out there now.
Chris,
Thanks for the feedback. We have a Festool EB2200 router at work for some heavy-duty routing that is not a good fit for our CNC mill. Ergonomically it’s fine, but it is too heavy and cumbersome for my taste. I was not familiar with Mafell, but their routers look well built. Lots of metal parts instead of plastic. But those prices are no joke! For my own occasional use I would certainly not want to drop € 1000 on a router!