Quick on the heels yesterday’s post, I continue on now with this account of the construction of a tsuitate, or freestanding Japanese partition.
If you want to shortcut back to the start, here is the link to the first post. Every post after that one has a link at the bottom taking you to the next post in the series.
During the rough cutting, jointing and planing of the bubinga, a had an unfortunate incident, with a little planer gouge taking place towards the bottom of one of the panel boards. Not sure how it happened, but it was a little too large of a divot to ignore, so I decided to patch it. Here’s the section of concern to me:
It’s a little hard to see how bad it is, but in the center of the outlined area with the word ‘snipe’ written on it, is a hole about 1mm deep. The Board on the left, the extra from the boards I sawed up, is the source for the patch, or ume-ki, marked out in pencil in the above photo.
This is a case where getting a precise match is well-nigh an impossibility, given the wavy figuring in the grain. I’ll just have to do the best I can.
Here, I’m just about finished cutting the plug:
I then used a router to thickness the plug down to around 0.15″. And here the plug sits side by side with the area to be plugged:
Next, the divoted area is trenched out with my trim router:
Then clean up to the line with a chisel or three:
After checking and re-checking the fit, here goes:
A while later I cleaned the glue off and planed it down:
Here it sits after the planing:
As you can see by the smear of glue still visible, I held off going right down to the surface with the plane. Out comes the card scraper now:
And I am soon reacquainted with my thumbs, which are braised like lamb chops as the scraper heats up.
It cleaned up pretty well:
I feel satisfied with the patch, given the difficulty of matching in figured curly wood like this. The seam between the two boards will be obscured by a vertical grill bar, so that certainly will help.
Once the scraping started, I figured I might as well keep going:
Anyway, the section of panel that I just patched has the considerable good fortune to be located at the bottom of the board near the ground (well, that’s as a result of my decision to place it there), and will not be quite so obvious to view I don’t think. Here’s what might be a normal viewing position of that board:
See the patch? How about if I zoom right in with the camera from the same vantage point?:
It helps that the bottom edge of the board sits in a 3/8″ dado, and the view is somewhat blocked by the grill bars which will be in front, so I am hopeful that the patched area will be fairly unobtrusive when all is said and done. I did the best I could.
There’s a lot of scraping ahead on these three panels, though one of them is pretty much done now. After the scrape-fest, I will be applying the oil, which I will wet-sand with 400 or 600 grit paper on a block of wood. I’m excited to see how the bubinga lights up when the oil goes on.
See you next time then. over to post 23