the Carpentry Way

Orphan: The Story of the Gazebo (II)

2012-02-02T13:56:00.002-05:00

Post 2 of a series. In the first post, I began my look at gazebos, which strike me as a bit of an anomaly in Western architecture, an orphan in several respects. Even the word 'gazebo' seems to have no parentage. It seems that the term 'gazebo' may well originate in China, though given the past history of the mangling/corruption of various foreign loan words into English, it is likely we may never know which Chinese word was being referenced. In that preceding post I also surveyed a few of the more common approaches for framing gazebos and similar structures without a ridge which can be seen in Western buildings.

Today I was planning to look at both Japanese and Chinese framing approaches to pavilions, however the topic is ridiculously vast, so we'll stick just with China for this post.

Chinese Pavilions.

Chinese timber framing generally relies upon some variant of purlin-supported roof structure, and a central king piece which is shaped to the same polygon as the building plan, enabling the rafters to meet the center with simple plumb cuts.

Here's one example, a pair of interlocked hexagonal structures with the interior purlin ring carried by a pair of cross beams on each of the hexagonal rooms:

I found a picture of a roof framed similarly, located in Suzhou:

I'm pretty sure the framing is metal, but it follows the structural logic of a wooden frame.

Another example, by photography studio ASA:

The framing concept can be extended into additional levels:

And one more - here's the exterior:

And an interior view of the framing:

A pentagonal plan may be similarly framed:

Pentagonal pavilions are uncommon, but I did find one Chinese example:

Considering the issue of interlocked hexagonal pavilions again, another framing solution is seen:

Here a series of concentric hexagonal beam arrangements progressively moves inward, each ring's corner parked on the mid-span of the ring outside of it. Here's SketchUp drawing from a Shanghai-based designer's site, showing such an arrangement of offset interior beams in a single structure:

I don't find the cantilevers well sorted in that design, but it conveys the idea of that approach to framing.

In another arrangement, the interior support beams are arranged reciprocally:

This idea I found spurred me into further investigation, as you'll see in a future post.

Another approach I've seen uses the hip rafter complexes in as cantilevers, the eave edge load balanced against the compression load at the interior purlin ring:

While we're at it, there are examples in China of square buildings with various polygonal arrangements of support beams inside, like this one, the Jindoudaifu Shrine:

How about another like that?:

Another one from a travel site called likefar.com:

And I'll toss one more in - a pair of partially-overlapped square pavilions and one possible support beam/purlin arrangement:

I'll finish with a picture of a two-tier hexagonal plan pavilion:

Given that many Chinese are quite superstitious, how about one more for, uh, good luck?:

That concludes this look at a few different Chinese polygonal pavilions - has it been worth your while? Please understand it is by necessity just a scratch on the surface of the topic.

Next post, we'll see what the Japanese approach might be. Thanks for dropping by the Carpentry Way.

Cap and Boots (III)

2012-01-31T08:26:00.005-05:00

This marks the third post in this thread examining defects common to older homes in particular. I guess I'm trying to address a couple of questions:

-is an older home worth fixing up?
-what are the downstream effects of the way we build houses, and is there a better way?

So far I've looked at roofs and foundations in post 1, then wiring in post 2. Today, I'll, uh, pipe up about another critical house system - the waterworks.

Plumbing.

The word plumbing relates to the Latin word for lead (plumbum). If you are looking for the atomic symbol for lead on the period table of the elements, you'll be looking for Pb, not L. It's number 82 on the table. Lead was a very common material for piping in years past.

Lead has a bluish white color when freshly cut, though this soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color with air exposure. Lead pipe is malleable and easy to work. It is also toxic to ingest lead, even in very tiny quantities. The ancient Chinese civilizations, along with the ancient Greeks and Romans, had documented lead poisoning problems. Here's a picture I found on Wikipedia of an ancient Roman lead plumbing fixture:

Lead water pipes were still in common use in the early 20th century and remain in many households. For some reason, the lessons of the ancients were not brought forward however this is an all-too familiar story hardly worth remarking upon. If your house was built before 1930, you can be fairly sure lead piping is present in the plumbing system. Repairing plumbing with lead piping is problematic. In the US, the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) required that after June 19, 1986 only "lead free" pipe, solder or flux could be used in the installation or repair of public water systems, or any plumbing in residential or non-residential facility providing water for human consumption, which is connected to a Public Water System. More specifically:

"The law prohibits any person from introducing into commerce any pipe, or plumbing fitting or fixture that is not lead free after August 6, 1998, except for a pipe that is used in manufacturing or industrial processing."

In an older house, so long as the water is not soft or otherwise corrosive, the interior coating on the pipes from years of water moving through means that there is little likelihood of further lead leaching into your drinking water and poisoning your young children. Still, if you do have young children, or are planning to have them, (or a pregnant woman resides in the household) are you willing to take the risk? Blood and brain disorders are no fun.

If you have a problem in the plumbing and need it worked on, your plumber is going to insist that all lead components be ripped out and replaced. Lead is porous and very difficult to solder onto, and non-standard old pipe sizes make connections to newer equipment problematic.

An alternative to lead piping seen fairly commonly is galvanized water piping, especially in homes built more than 50 years ago. This form of piping tends to corrode over time from the inside out, especially on horizontal runs, and of course since the damage is internal it can present a nasty surprise. Last year I was working on a bathroom renovation in an old house in West Hartford CT, and the pedestal sink's drain tied into a 1.5" galvanized nipple coming out of the wall. In an effort to remove the fitting from the galvanized nipple, I sheared the pipe off - inside the wall of course. A case where a simple repair operation becomes more involved. I had to open the wall up to access the stack vent pipe, and a 10 minute task became a couple of days long and a lot more costly. The 1.5" nipple had rusted away on the inside, and that's why it shredded when I tried to unscrew the fitting. It's best not to underestimate what may be involved with repair work to older plumbing systems.

I'm not a plumber by trade, so can hardly claim true expertise in the area, however I worked as a commercial irrigation installer for much of my twenties, and have glued miles of PVC pipe and sweated miles of copper pipe. I feel quite comfortable working with plumbing fittings, however certain tasks are only properly performed by licensed plumbers.

Another problem associated to internal pipe corrosion is a build up of debris and mineral deposits in areas where the pipe interior becomes less smooth, build-ups which can eventually cause blockages. Often householders will deal with blockages by pouring caustic chemicals into their system, which, though it might clear the blockage tends to accelerate the damage to the interior pipe wall, further exacerbating the problem.

Even new plumbing piping is not always a bonus. Between 1978 and 1995 polybutylene piping was commonly installed, and this has proven to be a disaster. The majority of leaks begin to make their appearance 10~15 years after installation. Apparently the presence of chlorine compounds in water will cause deterioration in the internal structure of the plastic and its fittings. There was a massive class-action lawsuit, Cox vs. Shell Oil, which lead to a $1Billion settlement. Building codes in both Canada and the US now prohibit the use of polybutylene piping and fittings in new construction.

Finally there is the stack vent pipe itself, which is designed to help the entire drainage system function. The modern standard is a 3" pipe, however older homes often have smaller vent pipes which do not allow the system to drain properly, and this in turn can contribute to the formation of blockages on the inside of pipes. It's like they develop atherosclerosis - and the heart attack may indeed come when you find out the cost of replacing these aged piping systems. Think about this too in regards to replacing a toilet with a low flow toilet - if the vent piping is too small, the draining will be less than ideal with a low water flow, and this is possibly going to engender other problems in the system, especially blockages.

The bottom line with piping is to go with copper if you can afford it. Nothing beats copper, and if current metal commodity prices continue in the upward direction seen in the past few years, that copper piping could be an alternative investment to buying other precious metals. You may have to protect it with a gun however. I'm only sorta joking.

Old plumbing fixtures are a mixed bag. They tend to be of much higher quality materials than new fittings and are generally fully serviceable and rebuild-able - if you can get the parts. Old toilets though are water hogs and there's no argument about the benefit of replacing them, especially if your water is metered and you live in an area with water shortages. If the porcelain on the old bathtub is in poor shape the cost of refinishing is a bit daunting. Old faucets, while of good materials and rebuild-able, often lack the flow rates of modern units so they may disappoint. Further, old faucets are not often ADA compliant, with extended lever handles, and thus many people can have difficulty operating the older faucets.

Cast iron sinks and and tubs from yesteryear are significantly stouter than their modern counterparts, and even if you choose to remove them, you'll get some good money for the scrap cast iron. Personally, I've always preferred sinks with the faucet mounted on a vertical surface rather than a horizontal one - this is what I've seen in at least some hospitals, presumably as a means of reducing places for germs to hang out. You want horizontal surfaces, where water will sit, to be easy to wipe clean. For some reason however, most modern sinks have provision for the faucets on the horizontal surface and obtaining wall-mounted faucets is becoming a little more difficult, at least from what I've observed in the plumbing display at local home improvement center. So, you may need to special order. Wall mounted faucets also have the advantage of freeing up counter space, and this gives a more streamlined look as well.

As a final point in regards to plumbing systems, if you are designing from new, it is well worth taking the time to design the plumbing system, especially the piping, so that it can be accessed for repair and modification. Think about how the pipes may have to penetrate other structural members and design so as to have as few penetrations as possible. Design so that there is room for more piping to be added in key areas if need be. Think ahead. Think how the building is going to learn - how likely it it might be that it require some modification 10 or 15 years down the line. Make sure the main water shut off for the house is easy to get to so that in an emergency the water can be shut off as soon as possible.

In the next post I'll take a look at old house systems in terms of the materials used. Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way.

Three!

2012-01-29T16:44:00.000-05:00

Well, I may be a day late, but I thought it would be worth posting up that this blog, with today's post being the 490th, and the page view total getting dangerously close to 400,000, is three years old! what long strange trip it's been, and I look forward to the 4th year with much enthusiasm and anticipation.

Compared to when I started, there are a lot more people blogging these days, however I've noticed that the vast majority of blogs never really get off the ground, and just sit static, and of those that are active, many seem to devolve into content consisting of little more than re-posting from other sites, video links, and other twitter-esque postings. It's not easy doing anything steadily, especially when the projects have not been as steady as one might hope. So, I'm feeling good in what I have managed to achive and feel that I provide content no available elsewhere. When you boil it down, it's all about content.

I'm thinking the same will hold true with the new study group that is forming and which will be getting underway in just a few days. I realize that there are other online sites where people can join study groups and work on projects but I think I will offer something unique with the Carpentry Way group. I'm not targeting the absolute beginner woodworker, as I don't think most beginners have any awareness of what is involved in Japanese woodworking and joinery, and therefore no interest. So, instead of spending time working on spice racks, calendar frames and that sort of thing, this study group will just jump right in to some challenging material. The first project is a new take on a Japanese standard - the wooden tool box. Ours will be fully joined, not nailed, and will feature a wide range of joinery. Here's a sneak peak:

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the readership for coming by with regularity to this site over the past months and for giving me the encouragement to forge onwards and upwards. The next year is going to be a good one I'm sure and you can look forward to my ongoing commitment to posting up on a wide range of topics pertaining to traditional carpentry and woodworking, East and West. The 'Cap and Boots' and Gazebo series both have a few posts to go yet, and soon I'll be starting a series on the Japanese plane's chipbreaker, uraba, which should run several posts. I've actually manage to persuade Mike Laine, a former co-worker of mine in California, to contribute a post on the blog here. I think you'll find his perspective invaluable - if there is anyone who is a Japanese plane guru, it is he.

Anyway, I hope where you are the shavings are coming off cleanly and the joints are light tight. Thanks for coming by and hope to see you again next time.

Orphan: The Story of the Gazebo

2012-01-27T14:30:00.008-05:00

The word gazebo is a curious one, as it seems a bit of an orphan, as do the structures themselves. According to what I have read, the word has no etymological history - no provable cognates in any European language. As Chamber's 20th Century Dictionary notes, "etymology dubious". While false etymologies have been put forward (for a discussion see here), and other etymological dictionaries mention several examples in that vein, the word is thought to most likely derive from some corrupted form of Chinese term. In fact the earliest citation of the word appearing in the English language is from 1752, in a book entitled Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste:

William Halfpenny, the author, was an 18th century English architectural designer- he also went by the name of Michael Hoare, and the co-author of the book, John Halfpenny, was purportedly his son though he may or may not have actually existed. Putting that aside, it should be noted that Halfpenny's book predates Chippendale's The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director (1754), and thus is an important text in the history of furniture - certainly Chippendale was not the first person to introduce 'Chinese taste' into Britain, and in fact Halfpenny mentions in his book's Preface that buildings in "the Chinese manner" had been "already introduced here with success." By whom I wonder?

If the word 'gazebo' derives from Chinese, and Halfpenny shows and illustration of a tower as a 'gazebo', then what word in Chinese denotes a tower? One Chinese character for tower is '塔', a character which originally referred to an earthen tower, or stupa. The pronunciation of that character in Mandarin is 'tā'. Not sure than helps much.

Another word for a Chinese structure of two or more stories is '樓', which is pronounced 'lōu'. The character '樓' is literally a continuum '婁' of wood '木'. Again, the pronunciation of that character provides no connection to gazebo. The word for a two-story pavilion in Chinese is '閣' - a character pronounced as 'gé'. Now we're getting somewhere perhaps, as this sounds quite close to the first phoneme 'ga~' of gazebo. The Chenghuang Pavilion in Shanghai is a recently rebuilt example of an especially elaborate '閣':

Usually though the character '閣' is found as a suffix, not a prefix, so it would be a stretch at this point to speculate much further on how the character might tie to the word 'gazebo'.

How William Halfpenny would have obtained any idea as to 'Chinese rural architecture' is anybody's guess. He certainly didn't visit China, so he must have seen sketches/paintings, possibly of Chinese origin, possibly done by a traveler to that part of the world. It would be a worthwhile research project to dig into this matter further, to try and see what sort of resources a British person in the 1700's would have on Chinese architecture.

I note that in Jame's Monckton's 1873 work The National Carpenter and Joiner, a photocopy of which I have on my bookshelf, a picture is shown of a 'floral bower' which looks like it might be derived from 'oriental' (and I use that word most carefully) archetypes similar to what is shown in Halfpenny's work. I came across a picture of a similar American pavilion, from the late 19th century:

It reminds me of a bird cage, and the roof is, well, clunky.

I've been doing designs for pavilions on and off for years. I like small open air structures, and pavilions are nice little modules in which to explore certain framing ideas. Polygons used for pavilions are typically octagons, and less commonly, hexagons and decagons. Other polygons are rarely used. I suppose the reason for this narrowness in types has to do with a couple of factors:

geometrically, octagons are relatively easy to work out, as 22.5˚-45˚-67.5˚ angles figure predominantly, and hexagons are 30˚- and 60˚-focused, also easy to work with as they are equilateral triangles and easily constructable with compass and straightedge.
polygons with an even number of sides mean that a given wall plate always has another wall plate directly opposite to in in the structure, and this tends to simplify framing decisions
once polygons get past about 12 sides they begin to appear closer to a circle thus negating the polygon form to an extent
more than about 10 sides starts to present a perhaps onerous amount of extra cutting - the visual gain, if there is one, from 8 sides to 10 seems hardly worth the extra cut out work required to achieve it.

Still, I find 6- and 8-sided structures so commonplace and standardized that I have frankly grown a bit bored by them. So, I've tended to play around with designs involving 5- or 7-sides. The lack of directly opposed wall plates presents an added challenge in terms of the roof framing. I'll share my solutions soon enough. First though, I'd like to spend the remainder of this post looking at Western approaches to framing gazebos.

Most polygonal structures I come across have a roof coming together at a point in the center. There are two solutions used most predominantly for solving this framing problem - either there is a central piece, a 'King'/'Boss' piece, formed into a polygonal section into which the rafters terminate, or the solution is to eliminate any central piece and have the first opposing rafter pair butt against one another and then the cross-wise pair butt against the sides of the first pair, and the other rafters are beveled so as to wedge into the remaining spaces. A variant on this method is to but the hip rafter together in the same manner, and then place a ring of blocks down a few feet from the apex of the roof and terminate the common rafters onto those blocks, as in this example from a website all about building decks

Here's an example of a fairly cleanly done 10-sided building with a King piece extended downwards so as to receive rafter struts:

I found the above picture doing an image search - the structure is produced by a company in Utah, to which I have no affiliation.

Anyway, in either case, King piece or not, the arrangement of the rafters spreading radially from a central hub is akin to the old common-rafter roofs on rectangular buildings here, an arrangement which tends to engender uniform compression loads to be transmitted from the roof, down the rafters, to the wall plate. The rafters will want to sag as well, and the middle of each plate will be vulnerable to being pushed outward over time by the rafters which land there. Once solution I came across is to place a ring of tension rods around the perimeter, just beyond the wall plate, as shown in this illustration from a DIY deck builder site:

Again, no affiliation. I think the use of metal tension rods, while cheap, logical and plenty strong, isn't the most attractive solution. Then again, most people wouldn't notice, and isn't that supposed to be the ultimate arbiter of whether or not we do something?

Not for me it isn't, and nor is it for most readers here I suspect.

Applying plywood to a roof deck places a shear diaphragm in place which will help keep the roof from sagging and deforming the wall plates outward for several years. Another way though to resolve the loading problem is to construct the roof in a trussed form so that the outward push of the rafters is taken by a horizontal element in tension, like a King piece/King rod truss, or variant. Here's one example, culled from a site I came across:

Not exactly fine timber carpentry, but it gives you the idea. One problem with employing a truss is that things can get rather crowded in the middle of the space, with horizontal ties pieces all meeting at the same point - to frame a structure like that in timber is awkward because the tie pieces can't really be all that strong when sliced and diced to come together in the middle, and the joinery work is fiddly. And finally, with a bunch of timbers crowing the scene, it doesn't always end up looking particularly elegant. I came across an example on a forum which illustrates this well, I do believe, in another stick-framed example:

So, the gazebo isn't the most straightforward thing to frame when you start considering it in detail.

And then think about this: what is a gazebo for? In classic Chinese gardens, along with Japanese ones, small structures in the garden exist for a variety of purposes, but a primary use for a pavilion is that is it meant to serve as a vantage point from which one looks outward. A pavilion in a garden is typically situated so that it offers a great view of some aspect of the garden, and often sits in a seclude place such that one comes upon it unexpectedly and when seated in it sees a view of the garden not available elsewhere. In the West though, preoccupied as we generally are with surfaces and appearances, we treat the gazebo not as something to be inside and looking out, but as an ornament in the garden to be looked at. There are a million companies selling gazebos out there, stick built, kit, timber framed, you name it. But the designs in the vast majority of cases are all about creating some object which you look out at from your house, or can see in relation to your house from the street vantage point. It's a form of wealth display - look what I got, and oh, did you see my new speedboat and wishing well? These are designs concerned more about the surface appearance of the building than they are as spaces meant to be used and enjoyed.

I think that the design of these structures primarily as objects to be viewed in the West leads to their orphan state, as the blog's title suggest - hardly anybody actually uses these things. They buy them, and abandon them. Why is that? On my travels about here and there, visiting many parts of the this continent over the past number of years, I have seen gazebos in yards and parks of all shapes and sizes but rarely do I observe anyone actually inside of one. And why would you? The interior aesthetics, especially of the stick-built examples, are often outside the realm of consideration in the design process, it would appear, so they are not terribly pleasant or practical places to spend time - unless people like looking at stained 2x4's that is. Maybe some do.

The gazebo, often plonked in the middle of a lawn, usually offers no view of anything besides the house, lawn, and street. Look again for a moment at the second-to-last picture above - how does the setting for the structure grab you? Nice view. What the structure does offer is an opportunity for roadside gawkers to look at you sitting in the gazebo, presumably enjoying the good life and consuming the right sort of products. They are entirely too self-conscious in that respect. They just sit there, from what I can tell, forlorn in the yard, discarded ornamentation from some dream of the Kingly lifestyle. The gazebo and the fake wishing well are in fact cousins in that regard.

Well, maybe some people use their gazebos, I don't know. I certainly haven't found one yet that is satisfying aesthetically or in constructional terms, though the promise is there. There's untapped potential to be sure. And even if the inside of the roof structure is relatively uncluttered, as it is with the smaller and simpler structures, the interior of the roof peak tends to be a somewhat dark place. In humid places, the interior of the roof peak is a great place for air to sit and stagnate, and this tends to promote mold (fungal growth) over time. It would be ideal to have an opening in the middle of the roof to allow air and light in, and many gazebos in fact have raised lantern portions, however the framing doesn't always make the most of the situation - often the framing blocks the light for the most part.

In the next post in this thread I'll take a look at Chinese and Japanese framing approaches to these small garden structures, and then share with you a design I've been developing over the past while.

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way, and comments always are appreciated. ➪ on to post 2

Cap and Boots (II)

2012-01-25T13:24:00.001-05:00

In the previous post in this thread I dealt with two of the most vital components in terms of keeping a house protected from the elements over time: the roof (cap) and the foundation (boots). You can have the fanciest German triple glazed low-e windows, doorbells with fancy chimes, Brazilian Cherry flooring, and gold-plated faucets, but if the foundation or roof have been shoddily built, all the trimmings amount to little more than lipstick on a pig. The trouble is, the way we build houses, the foundation and roof are two of the parts of a house which are often the most concealed from view. Out of sight means out of mind and the cap and boots tend to receive little to no attention until a problem arises.

Couple this hidden world with a culture that is programmed to be obsessed with superficial concerns, and you end up with some confused priorities. A couple gets a full reno done on their kitchen, gleaming new stainless jacketed appliances which will fail probably in 15 years, particle-board biscuit-joined cabinets with some jazzy veneers that are just making their 10 year detour before the landfill, and some clever accent lighting and tile work. They have guests over who ooh and ahh over the new kitchen, and they feel pride in 'what they have built'. But if the same couple instead put a new roof on or repaired the foundation, they're unlikely to receive the same accolades from their guests - I mean, how does one show off a new roof exactly? "Hey, look at the freshly-pointed bricks" is at best going to elicit an uncomprehending stare, a facile oh that's great!, or a quizzical look perhaps - why are you telling me this? The things that are most important in terms of the integrity of the house we tend to pay little attention to - and I mean that in respect to all phases of the life of the house, from the initial siting of the building without respect to where the sun shines, to its ever-so quick construction, to the places where we spend money on the house, to the areas which are given maintenance.

A constructional system in which critical aspects are concealed from view turns out to be a problem affecting many other aspects of the buildings we inhabit. In this post and the ones to follow I wanted to look as some of the less obvious aspects of a building, particularly old buildings, many of which I have had a good chance to examine over the past few months. First up: electrical.

Wiring.

Wiring needs to be protected from impacts and tends to look unsightly when visible, so we hide these systems in the walls and floors. The problem is, if there are problems with these systems later on, they are difficult to work on without, in some cases, ripping the walls and ceilings out to gain access. If the wall is sheet-rocked, this is not such a traumatic event, however most older houses have lath and plaster walls, not to mention one or more layers of wall-paper, cast plaster moldings, etc., and thus the decision to rip such walls out are not made lightly.

Many old houses around here have remnants of knob and tube (K&T) wiring:

In the photo you can see the 2-piece porcelain knobs fastened to the sides of the studs, and the tubes are the little ceramic pipes which guide the wires through any penetrations - like the wall plate in the above picture. This wiring is visible in old houses, particularly in the basement and attic. K&T wiring is/was quite safe when installed properly. The porcelain standoffs have a virtually unlimited lifespan, and even if the fabric jackets on the conductors is in poor condition the porcelain connectors keep any wire, even a bare one, safely insulated. The open air aspect of the design allows any heat in the wires to dissipate readily. Another advantage: by arranging wires on opposite sides of building structural members, some protection was afforded against short-circuits that can be caused by driving a nail into both conductors simultaneously.

It's a safe system in certain respects, but after 80~100 years, well, not so much. Two main weaknesses of this system are the lack of a ground conductor and a switch-protected neutral which could turn off a circuit (but not, unfortunately, the current).

The reason that K&T wiring was employed in early electrified structures was that it was, surprise-surprise, the cheapest option. According to one book, Wiring Houses for the Electric Light (1916), flexible armored cable cost about twice K&T, and conduit cost about three times the of K&T. Knob and tube wiring persisted since it allowed owners to wire a building for electricity at the lowest cost. Not much has changed I guess. The alternatives were armored cable (commonly termed 'BX' cable), and using conduit. In the aforementioned book, page 84, the matter is spelled out clearly:

While this K&T system was adequate in its day, problems do arise over time, as the building learns, to borrow a term from Stewart Brand. One issue is that of subsequent splicing of new wires into old. With additional branches and fixtures added, fuses are likely to blow more frequently. Then what people will do is install larger fuses, an unsafe solution since the wire and fuses are meant to be related to one another in capacity. The wires in such a system then tend to overheat from the added loads, which causes their insulation to become hardened and eventually the insulation starts to disintegrate.

Some people do not grasp that these cloth covered wires in their basement actually carry electricity, and may do unwise things, like hang their damp laundry off of the wires. Another problem that crops up with K&T wiring systems is that of retrofitting insulation in the hope of improving energy efficiency - this being installed quite often in attics where the K&T is also placed. Fitting insulation in and around the conductors of a K&T thwarts their ability to dissipate heat, and thus a potential fire hazard is created. Of course, this practice is now forbidden in building codes, but not every householder chooses to employ contractors who adhere or are aware of provisions of the building code.

Certain rodents seem to like to chew on the conductors - probably they like the fabric. Basically, houses with the old K&T system still installed are living on borrowed time. Many insurance companies will not provide insurance unless all the K&T is removed, and tearing it all out can be costly. Some older houses have had parts of the old wiring ripped out, but if the job was not done thoroughly and carefully, there still could be remnants of the system in place which are live. Then you have a mystery wiring situation on your hands, where it can be hard to tell what is part of what. I've run into this problem doing renovation work before - an old wire is thought dead, the breaker switched off at the panel and then you go to cut that wire and zzzzzzzzz! Not recommended!

The system which supplanted K&T after about 1930 in most N. American households was one based on encasing two or more conductors (but no ground wire) in a polymer sheath. This system is present in most houses built before the mid 1960's. If the receptacles in the wall only allow for two-prong plugs in your house, then you have this system. Since the early 1960s, wiring in new construction has required a separate grounding conductor used to bond (electrically connect) all normally non-current carrying parts of an electrical installation. To bring an older non-grounded electrical system into line with modern practice is costly and may require walls to be ripped open, so a lot of old houses have not had their wiring upgraded. The very way in which the wiring is placed in the walls, passing through studs and stapled into position, makes it a hassle to repair or replace. It's not an integrated part of the building system really.

In my current rented accommodation, only two receptacles in the apartment accept three prong grounded plugs, and this is inconvenient to say the least. My computer, for instance, is plugged into a surge protector, but the surge protector in turn has to attach to an adapter so that it can connect to the two prong receptacle. I can fasten a small screw to the adapter which connects it to the receptacle, but have no idea if the receptacle is properly grounded. So I live in hope of not having to have this system tested by a voltage spike.

I agree with that 1916 wiring book - the best way to wire a house is to put the wiring inside of conduit. It costs more to do so, maybe, but it allows wires to be pulled in and out with relative ease, which makes the system more resilient and adaptable over time. It's a question, I suppose, of having foresight so as to devise a system with problem-prevention in mind, which is relatively cheap in the long run, versus a system which might be cheapest to build initially but has no allowance for anything but problem-cure, which is often expensive. If the wiring isn't easily repaired and adapted to new circumstance, then the wiring tends to become a drag on development and in many cases a trade-off happens between the cost of making changes weighed against the risk of having electrical problems down the, uh, line.

In the next post I'll get the lead out with a look at plumbing. Thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way.

TAJCD Revamp: The New Volume II is Ready!

2012-01-23T14:30:00.003-05:00

After a lengthy slog of re-editing and re-illustrating, I'm happy to announce that Volume II of the TAJCD series is available again!

The cover shows a mortise and tenoned hopper, a project detailed carefully in the essay:

Table of Contents, page 1:

Please click on the illustration for a clearer view.

Contents, page 2:

A few selected page shots to give a better idea as to the layout and detail:

A look at the mortise and tenoned hopper joint:

Several joinery options for hoppers, including the twisted dovetail is covered:

Various methods are shown for deriving the hopper cut lines:

This essay is priced at $25, or is $10 for those who purchased the earlier version and want the upgrade. This volume runs 138 pages.

With this rewrite completed I will be turning my attention to getting Volume IV ready, which is slated for a mid-February 2012 release. Please contact me directly if any of the TAJCD volumes is of interest. There is a $15 discount if you purchase the entire set. A library in Canada has approached me about obtaining hardcover versions of the Volumes, so those will be available in the near future as well. Thanks for dropping by the Carpentry Way.

A Way Forward (II)

2012-01-22T02:56:00.003-05:00

A bit of a follow up from a post from September 2010.

I've been watching a TV series - online - produced by Channel 4 in the UK called Grand Designs. Most of the episodes seem to be about modernist architecture - oh, that's right, I'm supposed to use the word 'uncompromising' to describe that stuff. Frankly I'm sick of these glass, concrete and steel boxes with their flat leaky roofs, and more than few Grand Designs I have turned off after hearing the introduction. The following episode however was a most welcome antidote:

Grand Designs S09E13 The Woodsmans Cottage -... by goranr58

It reminded me of the experience many years back of building a pole shed which eventually became a cob cottage. Compared to many of the other episodes in the series, where couples drop £300,000, 400,000, even £750,000 on their assorted housing dreams (which invariably become extremely stressful build experiences), the 'woodsman', Ben Law, a fellow who earns his living by coppicing trees and making charcoal in the forest, created a lovely spacious home for his family in less than a year with his bare hands using poles straw, and stones, all for £25,000 and no mortgage.

Timber, clay, straw, stone: these are the materials that connect to sustainable architecture. These are the materials which connect a human build to the natural world. These are the materials which are light on the land, easy to modify, relatively easy to shape and manipulate.

Reflecting further on modernist architecture, one can have a hot or a cold reaction to the way it looks - people like what they like to a certain extent though it's hard to deny that a certain amount of marketing comes into play in terms of shaping opinions - but what clearly separates it from traditional building practice based on pattern and precedent is modernist architecture's treatment of, and reliance upon, materials. Not so much in terms of which materials are used, though invariably they are largely high-tech industrially-produced non-local high embedded energy materials which invariably offer low recyclability at the end of their life cycle, but in terms of the fact that the very way modernist structures are often designed involves an utter reliance upon materials to do the job of keeping people warm and dry. A job, I might add, once a shared task between materials and geometry, with geometry being the more crucial aspect. By 'geometry' I refer both to the angles in which pieces are arranged and their spatial relationships to one another.

The flat roof relies upon a rubberized membrane to keep the water out, as a flat surface's geometry does not tend to drain water especially quickly. And if that membrane is not perfectly installed, if the contractor was in a hurry and perhaps cut a few corners, if a piece of flashing doesn't quite fit properly, if environmental conditions at the time of install were not totally favorable, or a later bit of work on the roof involved some change with a component attached to that roof, like swapping in a new air conditioner, then failure is likely in that roof sooner rather than later. And when such a failure occurs, the result is invariably rather catastrophic. Most people want a roof to keep the weather out, not allow water to pour down their sheetrock and drip onto the dining table. And yet they think a flat roof is a safe bet? Are they nuts? Or was Frank Lloyd Wright correct when he quipped, "If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough"? When the owner of the building continued complaining about the roof leak, Wright said: “That’s how you can tell it’s a roof" (see the article in Architecture. November 1989: Fixing Fallingwater's Flaws). Perhaps architects aren't interested in technical quality, just in how it looks? Naw, that's a crazy theory.

Now, with a conventional pitched roof there are equal opportunities for shoddy installation and sub-standard materials, adverse installation conditions and so forth, but at least the geometry of the roof - it is sloped - encourages most of the water to run off.

Similarly, many modernist boxes, uncompromising as they surely are, have no eaves to speak of, and thus the walls bear the full brunt of the weather. Again the same issues affecting the quality of installation of those walls are a significant factor. So, premature degradation of those walls, increased likelihood of water ingress, and increased maintenance costs are the almost inevitable result. Many of these modernist cubes now have their walls planked in wood, which seems like an especially fancy way to put wood out to rot. How long is that going to last? The old sawmill across the street from where I used to live had pine planks on the exterior walls over 125 years old - and it had eaves.

Another aspect to this reliance upon materials in modernist architecture comes into play when you have designs featuring large expansive flat surfaces - like most of the walls, inside and out. When the surface is monochromatic and large, it is easy for the eye to spot defects in the flatness of the wall and evenness of the finish, which means that such surfaces present significant technical challenges to both the fabricator. A case in point is the new bus station being built in the town in which I live, an avant garde assemblage:

This building has a lot going for it in many ways, with all the trendy upbeat sounding stuff - Zero Net Energy, low v.o.c. finishes, passive solar, geothermal, low-e glass, etc. And that's most heart-warming. The upper part of the structure, a bowtie-shaped box, is clad in roughly 2' x 3' copper (or copper-anodized aluminum) sheets. In the architect's rendering, the wall is smooth and presumably reflects light evenly, however in order to achieve that outcome one must fold the edges of such copper sheets very cleanly and carefully and install them without introducing any distortions from either handling or fastening. The surface to which they are to be attached must also be very even, or can be readily adjusted so as to be even and straight. Tough to do. The panels must also make it to site without being dropped off the truck or strapped carelessly to the flat deck of the truck, or thrown over the fence by the Fedex guy.

This 'perfect' and 'ideal' outcome has not happened during this installation, and the wall, which I observe almost daily on my commute, giving it little more than a quick glance as I cruise by, shows all sorts of wrinkles and irregular reflections, especially when the late afternoon sun is on it. I imagine the architect would be, as least I hope, frustrated by such an outcome, as it is anything but the coveted sleek, however part of the responsibility lays with architects designing structures with such crisp flat surfaces. It's pretty hard for humans, especially with tight budgets and rushed construction schedules to produce perfection in installation, however it is not at all hard for humans to spot unruly surfaces. If an entire surface is uneven, it is one thing - like a hand plastered wall shows slight imperfections and undulations - but a wall that is supposed to be dead flat looks like a mess if just a few spots here and there are out of whack.

And so you can see given such outcomes that the choice would be to either specify surfaces which are inherently more variegated, or to find more sophisticated industrial methods to produce 'perfect' materials ever less reliant upon the skill of the installer to put in correctly. And that latter choice seems to have become the reflex. And of course the less reliant one becomes on skilled craftsmanship, the less on tends to need skilled craftsmanship, and the few skilled craftspeople there are over time. Many appear to have either starved to death clinging to principles, or became installers.

I think there is something wrapped up in the modernist ideal of some sort of gleaming sleek technological future we all must move towards, a future filled with marvelous materials that pop out of the lab on a weekly basis and find their way into buildings. And if this one fails there's sure to be another one coming out soon that will be even better and more marvelous and chock full of all sorts of benefits.

I'll grant that some modern materials are quite excellent in various ways, however most are made with the concern of economy above all else. To place such faith in materials when it comes to architecture seems decidedly odd to me - absolutely impractical really. The time proven lesson is that buildings work best when they rely upon geometry to weather the seasons, and not materials - pitched roofs, eaves, solid foundations, quality flashing and roofing materials, and so forth. Materials are important but it is more how we arrange them that counts.

The Copper Palace

2012-01-20T12:25:00.018-05:00

Today I'd like to share with you a Tōkyō residence formerly known as the Isono Mansion. This structure is one of the more unusual residences in Japan. Construction commenced in 1905 and was completed 7 years later, similar to the Ellison Residence I worked on many years back. Like Ellison's place in Woodside, the Isono residence was built without limits on the budget or construction schedule. When completed, this copper clad house, glinting in the sun, was quickly christened the Akagane Goten, or Copper Palace (銅御殿) by neighbors. It is one of at least three structures in Japan that go by that name by virtue of copper-shingled wall and roof cladding:

An island of beauty in a sea of modern ugliness. There is a site with an English page describing this house - otherwise all the resources I came across - and there aren't many - are in Japanese. I stumbled upon it while searching for something else - not an uncommon experience with a Google search, no?

The client, Isono Kei (I give the names as per Japanese convention, last name first), had made his money in the lumber business, and in fact was nicknamed the 'King of Forestry', or san-rin-ou (山林王). He wanted a house built that was especially earthquake resistant, took its design cues from temples, and which was highly fire resistant. Did Isono therefore seek out an architect for his unusual requirements, someone with a knack for drawing and model making but who probably wouldn't get his hands 'dirty' with actual construction? No. Did he seek out a designer, someone who 'sees the big picture' but who also probably won't show up on site, someone who is nowhere to be found when the little details start to matter? No. Did Isono seek out a pre-fab kit house manufacturer? No.

Isono put his faith in a 21 year old master carpenter named Kitani, Yonezo (北見米造). Kitani was given the discretion to oversee not only the budget, estimate and the carpentry work, but the design, planning and material sourcing. Materials were sourced from all over Japan, including fine Kiso Cypress, of which he bought an entire mountain's worth, as a Japanese saying goes. According to the website I found, Kitani didn't just buy wood from Kiso by the truckload,

"...he stationed a blacksmith there to make an edge tool tailored to each tree. Then he would make the rift-cutter carve the wood, and would make him do the process of checking the curve and then carving it over and over about 3 times, allowing not a single mm of impreciseness."

Unlike many 'palaces' created today, which are often essentially little more than gaudy boxes to show off trinkets, expensive art purchases, etc., the Akagane Goten was built with the constructional art uppermost, front and center:

"The materials, the finish up, the construction, all marked the best quality of that time. The interior was fully focused on the art of carpentry techniques. i.e., it excluded paintings, sculptures or other artwork to emphasize the beauty of the formulative (sic) design of wooden architecture.

One of the interior walls are said to have been painted eleven times by 2 Meisters. Not one crack was found after the great The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, proving the quality of their work."

I think they meant 'formative' there, and 'plastered would have been a better choice than 'painted', but it's actually quite well written in comparison to a lot of natively-translated Japanese material one comes across online. That this building survived both the Kanto Earthquake and the incineration of the city by the US in the mid-1940's, is a testament to some mix of luck and a successfully-realized design. It has resisted earthquakes, and it has resisted fire. Apparently even the sub-floor has some innovative construction which makes it damp-proof. I'd love to find out what those details are. Successful old buildings are a veritable goldmine of information about what works and what doesn't over the years.

I hope I have sufficiently whetted your appetite to see this place. From the street, it is much like a lot of high class Japanese residences - you can't see much:

The main entry gate is quite unusual. The carpenter built it out of dunnage, material from the lumber yard used generally considered as scrap, for weighting down other piles of material, etc. He had this scrap pieces charred by a gardener and then combined them together in an artistic manner, meticulously joined. The doors are solid Camphorwood (called kusu no ki, 楠の木, by the Japanese) planks, and seem to have stood up well for 100 years:

The carpenter's aim was to build an imposing gate, without using any metal fasteners - a gate no one else could make.

The main support posts have 30cm-long tenons going into stone plinths:

You see, 'rustic' can be done with a high degree of skill.

Past the gate and looking back:

The uplift on the gate eave edge is an interesting feature - not quite an eyebrow or kara-hafu (cusped) in form.

Approaching the house:

As mentioned, most of the exposed walls are shingled in copper:

The main sitting room of the house has an outstanding ceiling, a type referred to as ori-a-ge-tenjō (折上げ天井), what would be called in English a coved ceiling:

The fan raftered decorative eave is quite sublime, as are the wide plank boards in the center of the ceiling.

The use of 'cloudlifts' in this part of the house reminds me of Greene and Greene's ultimate bungalows, funny enough, though the level of craftsmanship in the Copper Palace is, I'm sure, several notches higher:

I really wish I could find more interior pictures of this house! The site linked above has some old black and white photos showing some of the interior detailing, especially the variety of shōji patterns, but I hunger for more!

I did find one picture showing part of what is presumably a portion of the guest room:

The 'moon' window behind the staggered shelves, chigai-dana, has a sweet pattern of kumiko, a bit reminiscent of Klein Quartic Hyperbolic Tiling:

Anyway, from all accounts, and from what I can see, this house is a masterwork of carpentry and is definitely on my list of houses to visit next time I'm in Japan. In the meantime, if any reader happens to be in the neighborhood of the Copper Palace please let me know!

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way.

Carpentry Study Group Update

2012-01-16T14:47:00.000-05:00

The Online Carpentry Study Group has been running now for about 6 months and we are about to start our next project, which will be a roof model. A few readers have expressed to me that they would be interested in podcasts showing Japanese woodworking techniques, and I've also heard from a few people who have indicated an interest in carpentry study outside the realm of descriptive geometry and mathematics.That makes good sense, and I have noticed that the more complex drawing work is really of appeal to a fairly small group of fanatics.

So, in effort to bring Japanese traditional carpentry and joinery work to a wider audience, I have decided to expand the scope of the online study group. Starting February 1st, there will be a new section of the Carpentry study group created, a section devoted to those looking to learn more about the fundamentals of Japanese joinery and woodworking.

The first project will be a toolbox, or dōgu-bako (道具箱). This box will be made in a slightly higher class manner than usual, as we will make most of the box using joinery. Both hand tool cutting and machine techniques will be shown. Participants can tailor the tool box to their personal needs, and after all, as one gets more into Japanese woodworking, a place to store and protect tools is worth having.

Besides the podcasts, study group members will receive mailings with project drawings, cut lists, and tech tips. I haven't done a podcast before, so it should be fun! We'll be tackling projects you won't find anywhere else online, and exploring complex joinery, both Japanese and Chinese, as we work through project after project. I'll also be covering topics such as jig making, tool sharpening, and Japanese plane set up and tuning.

The memberships are priced quite reasonably, and the more months for which you are prepared to commit, the better the price gets. Here's the breakdown for new members:

3 months: $100
6 months: $150
12 months: $200

There is a 30-day, 100% money back guarantee for new members. Members who renew will have 6- and 12-month options, and receive a further price break on their memberships.

In addition to the mailings and podcasts, there will be an online forum available, where members can discuss their projects with one another, post up any questions, and post up pictures of their work - and you'll be able to get some idea of what the carpentry drawing group members are working on.

If this is something which might be of interest, please drop me a line. My contact info is found on the right side of the page. We're starting in two weeks and its going to be a lot of fun. Hope to see you there!

Online, Open source, Low Tech, and...

2012-01-15T10:13:00.009-05:00

...absolutely brilliant!:

Global Village Construction Set - TED Talk from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

I feel like welding something! Wait, hold that, need to get a welder first...

Anyway, with a welder, a grinder, and a few clamps it's pretty amazing what you can build. With welding, you - ahem! - start to look at materials in an entirely new light

Here's the link to the presenter's site: Open Source Ecology

And how about another 6 minute clip, this one with details about the clay brick technology they are developing:

Practical Post Scarcity from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

Love the line in that clip about the complexity of technology we are burdened with, and how much of our lives is spent supporting it when much of it doesn't make us any happier.

The open source movement has its roots in software, but has since become an ideology of sorts. One of the recent successes for open source has been in education where people wanted an alternative to the for-profit education that was dominating the online landscape. The result has been less college programs like Online University and more college programs like Open University. Now, the open source movement has found a new and wide open field that could potentially change the way societies interact and operate.

Cap and Boots

2012-01-13T11:12:00.005-05:00

My wife and I have been looking at real estate a fair bit over the past few months. This seems like a good time to buy, with the post-bubble real estate market in the US essentially on life support, but so far our search has been quite uninspiring. The houses we have looked at, regardless of when they were built (and finding 150-year old houses is nothing unusual around here), are pretty much crap. The reasons they are crap, besides the fact that I'm perhaps picky in what I consider 'well-made', boils down to a cluster of factors, but by far the two most significant are the cap and boots. The fundamentals of good architecture are cap (the roof) and boots (the foundation) - if these parts are not done properly, the rest of the building, no matter how swank or delightfully detailed, will not stand the test of time and stresses of the environment.And chances are, frankly, if the builder did not fuss over the roof and foundation detailing, it is not likely the rest of the house was fussed over either. If the owners of the house neglected maintenance over the years, these troubles only compound.

Foundations.

Invariably old houses around here have problematic foundations. The common foundation arrangement you will see in pre-1900 residences around here is one which consists of a hole dug in the soil at least 48" down, with the walls of the pit lined with dry-laid granite fieldstone slabs turned on edge, or stacked. While I think stone is a fabulous foundation material in certain situations, what you see in house foundations here with the fieldstones is essentially a damp pit lined with the stones. More than a few basements I've looked in are flooded to some degree when it rains. The flooding of course tends to lead to the lower few inches of the household furnace and boiler rusting sooner than even the manufacturers might have hoped. Groundwater is high in some areas, sometimes the houses are build on sloped ground, gutters are in poor repair or are non-existent, and it is often the case that the original foundation back fill has settled thus leaving the perimeter of the house with a sunken ring in which water likes to sit. The water coming into the basement/crawl space in turn produces surface condensation, leading to mildew, fungi, and musty odors, and an unhealthful environment for its occupants. Such continuous moisture can cause deterioration of the foundation mortar, floor joists, beams, supports, sub flooring, insulation, and electrical-mechanical systems. As the foundation settles, the walls buckle, roofs torque, doors and windows cease to function smoothly, etc. I can well understand why Frank Lloyd Wright railed against foundations in his day. It is actually the case that such dry-laid stone walls were often expected to be leaky and provision was made for water passing through the wall to continue across a sloped (dirt) floor and out of the basement or crawl space. A house I used to live in nearby had a river in the basement during much of the year.

Another type of foundation that is pretty common in Massachusetts and surrounding areas, especially in houses built from about 1900~1950, are foundations consisting of brick or concrete mortared units. These are terrible! The same problems with water coming into the basement, except that the mortar makes up a much larger constituent of the the wall. Mortar cracks and degrades over time, and those cracks allow more moisture in which further degrades the wall. With fieldstone, it may be the case that only one of the rocks has settled, affecting a 3~4 feet of wall, however the bricks or concrete mortared units can develop zig-zagging cracks that can extend for long distances and the wall can easily buckle. Some types of bricks degrade and erode over time as well. A common combination is to have a stone wall in the ground, possibly mortared, with a brick foundation laid on top, and these brick courses are the ones visible above ground.

Foundations problems are extremely common here. My in-laws have a basement which has flooded more times than they care to admit. A common solution is for people to dig/cut a hole in the floor and install a sump pump to take the water outside. Admittedly a band-aid solution, but one which makes the house habitable.

Part and parcel of the crap foundations are the minimal distances these foundations project above the soil - 6~10 inches is fairly common. That means the wooden superstructure is too close to the ground, and degrades more quickly. Rotten mudsills and decaying clapboards are all together too common a sight on many buildings. In the winter, the snow piles up so as to bury the bottom foot of the wall structure, and in the spring means the lower portion of the wall stays a bit damper than it would otherwise. Sadly, this lesson seems not to have been learned, as a lot of newer buildings I see going up have a minimal foundation projection above grade. Well, at least the vinyl siding won't rot.

Roofs.

A lot of the timber-framed structures in this neck of the woods have what is called a common rafter roof. This is one of the simplest forms of roof, in which the 'A' -shape of the roof consists of little more than a pair of sloped rafters which meet one another at the ridge. The ridge may or may not have a ridge board, typically a 1 x 6 or similar. some of these roofs have been 'improved' by the addition of 'collar ties', a horizontal piece fitted to connect together an opposed pair of rafters a few feet down from the ridge. The problem with the 'collar ties' is that they are completely misconceived - not ties at all, but struts. Ties resist tension loads, while struts resist compression loads, and until one gets down fairly close to the wall plate in a common rafter roof, the loading from the rafters is one of sagging, which is a compression load. Anyway, these common rafter roof transmits its load down to the wall plates, creating a spreading force. This spreading force eventually resolves over time by pushing the wall plates outward, more so in the middle of the wall run than at the corners where the adjacent wall restrains movement, and causing the wall plate beams to be rolled over slightly. As the walls are spread outward, the rafters also sink down a bit, which in time obtains the classic look of such a roof: a sagged ridge-line. Compounding all of this is the subsiding foundation, with the result a wall plate bowed outward and bowed downward. Some call it 'charming' or 'rustic', but I tend to think, 'lousy framing method'.

Many of the buildings have minimal eaves. There are several reasons why this has come to be the case, outside the scope of this post. Suffice to say that minimal eaves mean that the weather lashes the walls of the building more severely than otherwise, leading to a greater amount of moisture traveling down the walls, This in turn leads to more water getting down around the foundation, more rapid degrade of wall cladding, window and door sills and casing, and more opportunities for moisture to get in behind the wall's outer surface. Those buildings that do have an eave of some sort often had minimal insulation and lacked a vapor barrier above the conditioned space, which leads to the roof deck getting warmed in the winter, melting the snow above, which leads to ice-damming at the eaves. The ice builds and can cause damage to the edge of the roof and it's covering, which in turn allows the weather in. Attempts to break up the ice dams often lead to damage of the roofing material, which then allows water in. Damaged shingles on the bottom 2~3 feet of roof surface mean water getting in and likely running down the inside of the walls. The house next door suffers extensively from this issue:

Slate roofs often have suffered many indignities over the years, accelerating their demise. Commonly seen are repairs involving roofing cement, or the major no-no of re-laying the roof using electroplated nails instead of hot-dipped galvanized or copper, which means the fasteners rust away prematurely and the shingles come loose.

If the roof has gutters then the ice-damming issue can compound, often leading to great masses of ice, and in the attempts to break up the ice, damage to the gutters. Other houses lack gutters and have minimal eaves, so when it rains, well, it's welcome to mini-Niagara especially where roof valleys are located.

Many older houses here which are built on an 'L'-plan invariably locate the front door to the house at the inside corner of the 'L'. I find this puzzling, since the inside corner of the 'L' is immediately below a large roof valley. In the winter masses of snow tend to follow that chute downhill, causing extra large snow piling right at the front door. In the warmer months, 'Niagara' is emerging right next to the door as well. Welcome to my humble abode - bring your boots and an umbrella 'cause we don't have one.

-----

There's a lot to like about older homes in certain ways, the materials were generally of better quality, the moldings were more interesting, the stairways grander, and so forth. But in terms of an architecture made to work in a cold and wet climate such as we have here in New England, what the frack were they thinking? These older houses have damp basements, damp walls, ice-dam prone roofs, and leak heat like a sieve from every pore. They smell moldy, more often than not. Many houses are heated by fuel oil, which is diesel by another name some have winter heating bills exceeding $1000/month. When you get down to looking at all this housing stock, and I've looked at hundreds of buildings, while a few might have the mythical 'good bones', just dealing with the foundation and roof issues properly (and not in another hack-job stop-gap mode or repair) is daunting - and very expensive. Some houses may be worth the investment, if that was all that was wrong with them. There are other factors at play too, and I'll look at some of those in the next post.

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way.

And then a Light Bulb Went off...(II)

2012-01-10T19:55:00.002-05:00

I think this clip from the TV series Portlandia pokes fun quite well at a certain type of 'artisan':

I think many artists/craftspeople, at least those who have moments when they don't take themselves too seriously, can see the humor in the above portrayal - we're not always practical or terribly business-like. One of the points I take from this is that artisans often do not sell the advantages of the their work very well, or at least many in the public might not perceive much of an advantage with something handmade over mass-produced. And if you are an artisan making things "by hand", does it make any sense to compete with your wares against mass-produced items? I guess only if you can convince your market that the advantages conferred are worth the cost difference. I wouldn't pay $68 for a light bulb that was fancy but only lasted a few months, however I would pay that for one which lasted 50 years (even if I don't live 50 years longer!). Not sure though whether a 50 year light bulb is a valid selling proposition in this culture, at least for most buyers.

There are people lined up to buy Richard Mille wrist watches at $400,000, while a $25 Timex will serve a 'similar' function, so somehow those that are excited to buy Mille's products have arrived at a place where they are willing to pay, and handsomely, for a perceived difference. How is this the case in terms of watches and cars and clothing, but not so much in terms of furniture and, I would say to some degree in architecture? Some might ask where the great craftsmen have gone, and unfortunately many have starved to death, literally or figuratively. They failed not as a result of what they made, but largely, I suspect, in how poorly they sold and promoted their work, presuming there weren't other factors involved.

I've been thinking a lot as 2012 gets underway about how to market my work more effectively and meet the clients I know are out there. The economy is what it is, and sitting around waiting for a ship to come in is not often a wise course of action at the best of times, so I'm giving more thought as to how to connect with the market for custom made high quality solid woodwork and architecture. If anything, I suffer from thinking too small sometimes and need to aspire to bigger dreams I think. That's how things seem here in early January. I've been doing a lot of design work and will likely be sharing some of that with readers here on the blog.

It's been very rewarding over the past few years to hear from readers from many countries, and learn about how much they have enjoyed and been inspired by this blog. The tricky bit is to figure out how to connect and inspire those who might commission work from me. I've talked to many other woodworkers about this matter over the years, and frankly, most of us haven't a clue at all. Most woodworkers are simply getting by day-to-day, much like a ship bobbing on the waves, never knowing if a wind will blow them into some new exciting place or whether they might be becalmed indefinitely. While control might be illusory in certain respects, doing nothing and hoping for the best is really about a surrender of whatever 'control' there might be. I don't want to see myself as a ship adrift on an ocean - I want to hoist those sails (sales?) and go somewhere. Every day brings another opportunity to figure out this puzzle and I remain optimistic that solutions will be found.

I do think that if you believe in what you do, believe in the path you take, that you are the best-positioned of anyone to sell the work you do, because sales after all is nothing more than sharing an enthusiasm with a potential buyer. Many of us are repelled by sales and salesmen because they have to fake that enthusiasm, but with one's own work that is never an issue - more the problem, usually, is being a bit gosh-shucks, it's just a li'l thing I made kinda-shy about the whole thing. Some buyers might be charmed but to others such self-effacement on the part of the artisan comes across as uncertainty, un-professionalism, or vacillation. Not strong selling vibes.

So, where's the happy middle ground? I made this or that piece, and I might at times be proud of what I do, but I'm not going to ram it down the potential buyer's throat either. Surely there's a place between clubbing them over the head and letting the subtle virtues 'speak for themselves'.

I recognize that in this advertising-saturated culture the buyer often has a wall up to any attempt at selling, and is trained to be skeptical and is trained to be unaware of subtle details with many things made from natural materials. They're untrained, let it be said, because those of us specializing in making things with these subtle details have generally done a pathetic job of presenting such information to the buying public. There's a lot of room for improvement.

And I think that one's self-image has a lot to do with whether one advances into areas and endeavors which might not be entirely comfortable. Personally I find it easy to self-identify as a technician and as a designer, a bit less so as an entrepreneur, and even less so as a salesperson or manager. Yet managing a business and creating sales is what allows the designing and creating to take place, and the shop rent and heat to be paid, etc.. I can see clearly what holds me back. So, it's either wish upon a star or work on these weaker areas and see what happens. I'm choosing the latter option. That's the general plan for me and my business, Azuma Design Build, as 2012 rolls along. I'm focusing in on what I really want to do and walking straight towards that, and that means more architectural work. I like creating structures, and while I love furniture, it is timber buildings, especially intricate roof carpentry, that keeps me up at night. I've have the equipment and experience, and invested time and money into obtaining a contracting license, and well, we'll see what happens from here. I'll keep readers posted.

Thanks for dropping by the Carpentry Way.

TAJCD Revamp: The New Volume I is Ready!

2012-01-07T14:07:00.003-05:00

A week ahead of schedule I have completed the revamped version of The Art of Japanese Carpentry Drawing, Volume I : Carpentry Mathematics. It is now available for purchase. Originally about 70 pages in length, this volume now reaches 102 pages. I have completely revised it- redrawing virtually every picture and revising the text extensively in sections. As listed on Ebay the price is $22, however if purchased direct from me the price is $20 - the extra $2.00 covers listing fees on Ebay. This essay is sent out as a .pdf download, and future revisions of this expanded edition, should they be required, will be sent to original purchasers free of charge.

If you purchased the old version of this essay, when it was bundled together with Volume II, the expanded version is available to you at the discounted price of $10.

The cover:

Here's the first page of the table of contents:

And the second page:

A few pages so as to show the general appearance and lay out:

With that done, I can now commence work on revamping Volume II, which introduces Japanese compound joinery by looking at Japanese methods for working with triangles and a detailed look at the most elementary form of compound joinery work, regular plan, regular slope hoppers. I expect this re-writing and re-drawing will take me another week to 10 days, so look for an announcement here when it is ready for shipment. After that, the new essay, Volume IV (Compound Splayed Post Carpentry) will be completed and made available.

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way.

Big Wheels Keep on Turnin'

2012-01-06T20:24:00.004-05:00

I was looking at a picture the other day that most readers are undoubtedly familiar with - Pieter Breugel's The Tower of Babel:

Click on it to enlarge if you like. In the foreground there are some figures - apparently the Kingly figure with a few serfs bowed down in front is Nimrod. You know, I am certainly no bible scholar, but I managed to make it to my mid-forties without knowing that 'nimrod', a term of insult not uncommonly shouted out in my primary school days, actually referred to a historical person. Anyway, the oil painting by Breugel is quite stunning I think, especially since it involves construction of a tower! Looking more closely at it I noticed the timber framed devices and structures of various sorts, and a few different sorts of cranes - by far the most intriguing is this one:

Again, click to enlarge. What a funky looking thing! See the two men walking in one of the wheels? I did some digging and researching, and it turns out that is a type of crane called a treadwheel crane. Like a wheel for mice to run in, these cranes operated on the basis of having several people walk in the wheels. The crane pictured in the painting is quite accurately done - here a 1886 photograph of a treadwheel crane from Brugge, Belgium, attributed to Roger Kokken:

Wikipedia has a write up on these cranes of course. I also found a great site with an excellent article on the history of human-powered cranes: Low Tech Magazine. Worth a bookmark - also most definitely worth a read is the article on Chinese wheelbarrows on that site.

What appeals to me about them is their quirky shape and their fairly complex woodwork - here's another example from Brugge - a modern reconstruction:

These cranes with their boarded up covering were quite durable - several of the one's I've come across in my reading seem to have lasted 300~400 years, and such cranes were in use until the latter part of the 1800s when steel cranes began to supplant them.

I wonder what sort of emergency braking mechanisms these cranes had, if any? I mean, you can imagine the consequences with some huge stone lifted high up and then one of the walkers trips...

I've come across many references to cranes and their construction in old French Carpentry texts - Mazerolle, for example, shows a couple of small carpenter's hoisting cranes - chèvre - in the first part of the book, along with other carpentry tools of the day (mid 1800's):

A similar crane, and all it's parts, is shown in the J. Krafft book Traité Sur l'art de la Charpente Théorique et Pratique at the library of Congress in D.C. . Also in that text is shown a larger version for lifting stones:

While this looks at first glance like a treadwheel crane, the front elevation view shows that such is not the case.

It's a great pleasure, if not a voyage of discovery, to look through old carpentry texts to see the sorts of work once considered part of the trade - cranes, timber centering for bridges arches and tunnels, wall reinforcement, performing arts stages with moving floors, etc. The replacements for wood in all these fields is invariably metal, which, while it serves it's purpose admirably, is a product of comparatively high technology, high embedded energy, and industrial organization.

I suspect such a system as we have is but one of the many unsustainable bubbles piggybacked upon cheap, abundant sources of concentrated energy (timber then coal, and finally petroleum). It would not be far-fetched to think, given the opposing directions in which the supply and demand curves for energy are heading, that some of these old-fashioned devices made of timber, and the techniques for constructing them may one day have use again. In a funny way, I hope so. I'd rather make a traditional Chinese wooden wheelbarrow than buy a metal Chinese-made piece of junk from a box store. Wooden trestles, wooden cranes - bring 'em on!

A View from 1900

2012-01-04T19:27:00.002-05:00

Fred T. Hodgson was a prolific writer on Carpentry at the turn of the 19th~20th centuries. A fellow Canadian (from Duntroon, Ontario), Hodgson first came to my attention with his 1909 publication, "Practical Uses of the Steel Square,". Besides carpentry, Hodgson wrote on a wide variety of trades and their techniques, including wood carving, stair-building, architectural drafting, upholstery work, and even concrete, stucco and plastering work. Hodgson was an architect and the editor for National Builder Magazine, the FHB of its day. He also submitted articles for other construction trade magazines, including Architects' and Builder's Magazine. I've been reading through his series entitled "Carpentry Under Modern Conditions" which appeared in consecutive issues of Architects' and Builder's Magazine from 1899~1900 at least. This series covers an intriguing range of topics, from stair-building, double circular work for widow assemblies, splayed post work, and so forth. I often find Hodgson's comments on 'the trade' rather interesting. Considering a common topic among woodworkers, which might be termed 'the machine question' (on whether it might be better to use hand tools or machines, or both to work wood), I thought I'd share what Hodgson had to say on the topic of machinery in January 1900:

At the time Hodgson was writing, the fin de siècle, the Master Builder tradition was in the final stages of collapse. Master Builders were those for whom carpentry was an art and science, and had not devolved almost entirely into an assembly task with industrially-produced materials. The year 1900 - the Chicago World's Fair was a recent memory, Frank Lloyd Wright had just struck out on his own. There was a lot of tumult in the building industry, as the trades and the building unions fought against the factories, and lost. I wrote about this topic at some length in 2009 in a series called The Master Builder Tradition: What Happened? Part VI of that series ties quite closely to today's post, so readers may wish to take a look at that. Hodgson, it seems to me, was a bit forward-looking, and, evidenced by his writings, had come to some degree of accommodation with 'the machine' and its use in the trades.

In Hodgson's day, much was in flux and an enterprising and hard-working young person, or one blessed by accident or luck with the right opportunities, might move in a matter of weeks from apprentice to journeyman, and soon after to foreman and then boss maybe a month later. Hodgson recognized that though the progress might be swift in terms of moving up through the ranks, the acquisition of real carpentry knowledge takes many years to acquire, and thus one reads his frequent exhortations that the 'young mechanic' devote himself to study and not be satisfied with what he does know or what his company position is but rather continually looking about for new ideas and methods. It is clearly written for an age in which the traditional apprenticeship has been relegated to a side track. I often wonder how many of his readers did just that - studied, pushed themselves? I wonder how many do today?

TAJCD Revamp in Process!

2011-12-30T13:49:00.003-05:00

With the New Year just around the corner I thought I'd announce some of the developments with the essay series I have had available for a couple of years now, entitled The Art of Japanese Carpentry Drawing. So far, this series runs to three volumes and 450 pages of material. Volume I and II, which come as a set, dealt with mathematics for carpentry and took some initial steps down the compound joinery path with a look at hoppers, or funnel-form boxes. Volume III, some 280 pages long, looks at Japanese splicing joinery in some detail - in more detail, I suspect, than anything else written and illustrated on that topic. Look for more volumes to come on the subject of joinery.

These volumes have very much been a work in progress, evolving and improving as time passes. The ultimate goal is the publishing of a hard-backed multi-volume set on Japanese carpentry drawing and woodworking. That set will likely be quite expensive, and is many years away. In the meantime, I am choosing not to hole up in a cave to write the magnum opus, and instead am making the material available in a volume by volume fashion, as .pdf files. These files can be printed as the buyer may prefer- a page here and there to take into the workshop, or the whole works as a bookshelf reference.

As I have been selling these volumes, I have gained insights into improving the volumes by constructive feedback that some readers have kindly offered. Any revisions of the material I have been sending out gratis to original purchasers. Volume I and II are currently in their 5th revision, while Volume III has yet to be revised at all. That's the beauty of the .pdf format - it cuts the selling cost significantly and allows for the material to be easily revised and improved at no additional expense.

In the past 6 months I have been running an Online Carpentry Drawing Study Group. We have just finished the second project, and through that process of mailings to group members - 21 mailings so far and counting - I have produced additional material for the TAJCD series. This additional material, combined with further thoughts I have had about the configuration of those essays, has led me to conclude that it is time for something greater than a mere revision - a revamping is in order. In fact, besides adding hundreds of pages of new material, I am actually re-illustrating a significant portion of the essays to improve clarity and streamline the appearance. It's a whole lotta work, let me tell you.

Volume III will remain unchanged. Volume I and II are no longer going to be sold as a set, but will be available as separate volumes, each of which is being significantly enlarged. Volume I/II together tallied 145 pages, while the revamped Volume I alone is past 120 pages at this stage of the process....

Here's a sneak peak of the new cover page for TAJCD Volume I: Carpentry Mathematics:

The revamped Volume II adds a raft of new material on mortise and tenoned hoppers and other joinery options for these forms, taking it to around 140~150 pages.

The new volumes are priced at $20 for Volume I (@100 pages) and $25 for Volume II (140 pages). As this revamping is far more extensive than a simple revision, I will not be sending the new volumes on to past purchasers at no charge - but in recognition of this past support, I will cut the price in half for original purchasers of Volume I/II sets, so $22.50 would obtain the revamped Volumes I and II for those folks. Volume III stays the same, price-wise, at $40.

The revamped Volume I and II will be available for purchase January 15th or so.

In addition a new Volume IV is coming out, a detailed look at compound splayed post geometry and construction. This Volume is slated to be available in February and is to sell for $30. Here's a sneak peak at the cover:

Information on mortise and tenon joinery for splayed post structures is virtually unavailable in the English language, and what is out there, from what I have seen, is rather limited in scope and misses out on most of the finer points. I'm anticipating that this volume IV will break new ground in explaining in detail the geometrical and layout issues in undertaking such carpentry work.

Once the new volume is complete and available for purchase, I'll post up a notice here on the blog, along with a few more peaks at the contents. I'm aiming to meet a February 15th deadline - wish me luck!

These revamped essays along with the new Volume IV should bring the total amount of material close to 700 pages.

I also will be offering a discount for those who wish to purchase all four volumes as a set - $100 instead of $115. As before, those who complete the Volume I and II material can opt to take an exam ($5.00), and completion of that exam, and a small project, is the access pass to joining the Online Study Group. I'm hoping to really get this group up to full steam this year and look forward to seeing what projects we can sink our teeth into. Next up for the group is the first of many roof model studies.

Thanks to one an all for your interest in visiting the Carpentry Way over 2011, and I greatly wish all the best to readers for 2012, both in their professional and personal endeavors. I look forward to seeing you next time!

Mix and Match (IX)

2011-12-29T14:36:00.003-05:00

This particular piece of furniture was not of the project type analogous to, say, a love child with a difficult birthing. It started out in fact as little more than an idea to throw a plywood shelf in a corner to free up some counter space. Then, well, thinking about it, I realized that I wasn't feeling too stoked about a piece of plywood, so I took some leftover Black Cherry boards and glued up a shelf. I had then marked out that shelf so it could be cut to fit in around some door trim and another bit of molding. Well, further thought led me to conclude that it would be waste of the Cherry to make something so specific to the location, something I couldn't readily reuse elsewhere were we to move house someday. So... I then decided I'd make a slightly more involved piece, and that morphed slightly and got more complicated as I dealt with each issue that arose in the process of designing the piece in my mind. Kind of like the mythical frog that boils to death in the gradually-heated pot of water -- I hope not!

I wanted to do something 'quick' and 'simple' but also wanted to treat the materials, even if they are leftovers, mere scraps, with respect and build something that would last a while. Then I realized I could explore some new joinery ideas (new to me at least), and that's what led to the design of the twin half-tenons attaching the posts to the shelf boards, locked in position by the mitered breadboard ends, and the decision to try out the quintuple through tenon attachment between the stretchers and the posts. That, in turn, led to obtaining a bit of experience working Ipe in a context other than screwing together decking, and to the opportunity to work some fairly small 1/8" peg mortises. All very beneficial outcomes in my mind at least.

I normally spend a fair amount of time with any piece of construction in the design phase, working out proportions and joinery details. For any piece made for a client, that is invariably my approach. Here, I decided to take different tack and simply work things out in my head as I went along. Indeed, I have known more than a few woodworkers who always work in such a scribble-on-a-matchbook fashion and who avoid drawing and mock-ups like the plague. The problem with such avoidance however is that it is quite easy, especially with pieces you haven't made before or with joints you haven't tried before, to overlook some little detail or fail to anticipate certain consequences of certain decisions made. In the case of this project, I nearly painted myself into a corner with the seemingly minor issue of the feet and their attachment to the bottom shelf board. sometimes what seem like afterthoughts can rear up and bite you.

Another issue appeared upon assembly of this piece. The mitered breadboard ends were a tight fit and I held off driving them fully into position in the trial fitting stage since they might be difficult to remove without damaging something. So, when final assembly came, there were some unknowns in the fit, though I was fairly confident that the fit would be acceptable. And acceptable the fit was, however there was one small glitch unrelated to the fit:

You can see a small triangular opening at the upper corner. This was not intended at all. When I saw it I smiled and realized that in configuring the mitered end of the breadboard to terminate in the corner of the stick, I had overlooked the fact that the dovetail tenons ends were not in the same relative position as the faces were on the opposite side of the shelf. The tenons are inset 1/8" back from the faces. The above issue could have been readily solved by moving the outer tenon to the left about 1/8".

Well, there you go, there you have it. It's seppuku for me I guess. If this piece were for a client, I'd have a real mess on my hands, considering that wedges had already been driven into several of the through-tenoned joints. I might have had to remake all the posts and the entire grill shelf. Fortunately, this piece is for our house, and I can jolly well live with those little triangular openings! They'll add to the piece - a point of conversation even.

Anyway, on with the assembly. It was time to fit the 1/8" pegs. I carefully made some final adjustments to the draw-bored tenon mortises with a jeweler's file, then proceeded to insert the Gonçalo Alves pins into place from the outside, with the aid of a smaller hammer:

Emerging into kindness, as one of my old friends is occasionally wont to say:

All the way through, with only a trimming cut to go:

I rechecked the assembly from time to time to make sure my tapping and wrangling wasn't upsetting the squareness:

I found the odd spot that needed some additional clean up with the plane:

The feet were then dropped in and tapped across into position on the underside:

I'll leave the tenons long on the underside.

That was pretty much that. The completed piece:

Another view:

A look at one of the 1/8" pegged connections with everything trimmed clean:

Looking from below at one of the post-to-top-to-breadboard end connections:

And a view of the same post where it meets the Black Cherry shelf below:

While that does look like a pen mark on the Cherry, I can assure you it's just a black streak in the material. Cherry has these funny fine black lines in it here and there - you can see another one on the exposed tenon. The breadboard end needed a lick with the plane at the time of the photo.

My wife is quite sensitive to any sort of chemical fumes, and since this piece was going to be near a heat source, and given that the shop is unheated and getting a finish to cure properly would take a fairly long time, I elected to simply clean up any slightly rough areas, scrub the piece with a 3M polishing pad, and the rub in a coat of wax. That, my friends, was the fastest finishing job in history.

What is this thing supposed to do, you may ask? As I mentioned in the 7th post in what must be one of the subtlest hints of all time, this is a new fire station: it's a toaster oven stand:

With the rice cooker on top, and a shelf to keep toaster oven accessories, we have some space freed up for some other small kitchen appliances we frequently use. Another view:

I hope you all enjoyed - or at least managed to stay awake for - this mini build thread. Did you think the woods used went together, color wise, fairly well? It's simple little piece, the making of which had its share of successes and failures. Perhaps it was barely worth blogging about but things are a bit slow otherwise, and besides, no one was exactly advising me against such a move. I'm glad I made this small stand and learned some good things in the process. Though it was relatively 'quick' to make, the labor hours that went into it do make such a piece a fairly expensive proposition if I were to make one for a client. Nothing new there. My wife seems pleased with the result and I'm sure the stand will serve us for many years to come. Thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way on your travels today.

Mix and Match (VIII)

2011-12-28T18:46:00.005-05:00

Moving right along with this thread describing the construction of a small joined piece of furniture. Other posts on this, and other topics ,can be found in the blog archive to the right of the page.

At the conclusion of the previous post in this series, I showed the testing of the double dovetail mortises for the feet. Once the mortise fit was confirmed, I went on to make the actual feet:

Here's the four of them:

I used abrasive to shape the curved tapered form of the feet, and then polished them up on my granite surface plate with a sheet of 400 grit 'L.U' sandpaper. The underside of the feet needed a slight clean up with a chisel between the tenons:

So that was pretty much it for the fabrication stage - I now had a tidy pile of bits which need to be combined together:

First up, I fitted the grill and the top and bottom pieces to the uprights. Then I could complete 'the cage' by placing the last two uprights into position:

The piece is on its side in the above photo.

Here's on the the uprights, the posts if you like, tapped down into place - this is a joinery idea I had which could combine the twin half-dovetailed tenons with the mitered breadboard end:

Once the posts were all knocked into place, I checked that things were squared up and then started putting some wedges in. There's no glue in this piece, it's all joinery. I fitted four wedges into the outer quintuple through tenons, the mortises having already been internally tapered to accommodate the wedges:

Fully down:

I trimmed the wedges off and left the tenons proud. Onto the breadboard ends - I tapped them down with a piece of wood to protect the surface:

A look from the inside as the end piece is started on getting tapped down:

Almost there:

I thought I had a final picture for that corner, but instead all I seem to have on my camera are pictures from the Black Cherry end - they're all identical so it's the same deal. The breadboard end tucks under the outside face of the post:

I had configured the miter on the end piece to run right to the corner of the post.

A look at the other end:

With the breadboard ends seated, I drive a couple of 1/4" wedges into the central tenon:

The central tenon and its wedges was then trimmed flush.

Onto the 'ladder', a grill serving as a shelf in this piece. There were four through tenons - soffit tenons - each to receive a pair of wedges on each side of the piece:

I then trimmed them all flush:

Well, that's enough pics for one day. Tomorrow I'll be back with the concluding post showing the remainder of the assembly. I hope you'll return to see how it all went. I must say assembly is indeed a relaxing affair when there is no glue involved.

Thanks for dropping by the Carpentry Way. ☞ on to post 9

Mix and Match (VII)

2011-12-27T16:50:00.005-05:00

Post 7 in a series describing the [uncharacteristic] almost non-existent design and impromptu build of a small joined piece of furniture. Primary woods being used are Jatoba, Ipe, and Black Cherry, with a few Gonçalo Alves pegs thrown in for good measure. Previous installments can be found in the blog archive to the right side of the page.

When I left off last time, I had just completed fitting some Jatoba crosspieces to a pair of Ipe stretchers using two varieties of soffit tenons. The Jatoba crosspieces had been planed on three sides - I left their top surfaces alone until they were all fitted, so I could plane the surfaces of the cross pieces flush to the stretchers. Planing started at one end..

...and finished at the other:

The ladder for the, uh, new fire station is now complete:

Another view:

Of course, the wedges still need to be fitted to lock it all together, but that will happen after the whole works is assembled.

Speaking of that, I ran the rip saw down the soffit tenons in preparation for the wedges:

Then I knocked the ladder apart again so I could give the Ipe a last kiss with the plane:

I was just taking a thin, thin pass off, slicing away the pencil marks and any grubbiness:

Almost done now - one minor item remained: the feet. This piece is 'designed' (and I use that term loosely) to rest on a hard surface and I needed to fit some sort of feet into place. If I had spent more time at the beginning doing a detailed drawing, I'm sure I would have come to a more ideal solution. As it was, I felt like I nearly painted myself into a corner by not giving this aspect of the piece more forethought. anyway, after running innumerable schemes through my mind over the past week, I finally hit upon what I felt to be a decent solution.

The feet were to be mounted on the underside of the Black Cherry floorboard, and the layout took a few minutes to sort out:

Then I routed out the core of the join in a series of steps (not illustrated). Following that, it was time for a bit of paring:

A more or less complete concealed sliding double dovetail mortise:

I then made up a test stick for fitting- the feet are to be made of Jatoba, oriented as a tree grows with the grain running vertically. The test stick took several steps to make, but here is the final trial fit:

The grain in the dovetails is oriented in such a way that any seasonal movement will have minimal effect upon the tightness of the joint.

To start, the twin dovetail tenons are inserted:

And then slid straight down to the bottom (not, of course, so that they bottom out on the tenon ends - I leave a clearance gap of 0.005" or so:

Then a little persuasion was required to get things moving down what can only be called a slippery slope:

Further, but not quite there yet - maybe a couple or three more taps:

When the tenons are fully home one would never know that there was a joint there. It's best kept a secret I suppose - I'll tell them I just glued the feet on the bottom:

With the fit confirmed, I made the 4 feet, and erased the pencil lines off the bottom of the Cherry board. I'll show those finished little feet in the next post, along with the final assembly of this item. Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way. ☞ on to post 8

Mix and Match (VI)

2011-12-24T17:04:00.002-05:00

Following on from yesterday's blog, here are a few more photos from a small joinery project I am working on. In the preceding post, I showed the work undertaken on the stretchers, each of which received 7 mortises. Some of those mortises were blind, and some were run through.

Next it was on to the crosspieces which run between the two stretchers. These I made out of Jatoba, and they're 0.5" thick and 0.75" tall. Part way through the cut out process, I checked at one stage to see if I had obtained the desired target length of 10.0":

That's close enough I guess. And no, it didn't need to be quite that accurately cut, but I'll take it when I can get it.

These crosspieces all have rift grain, and I was hoping they would be cooperative to plane - they were:

I've had less than enjoyable times planing vertical grain Jatoba, which is very tough on cutting edges, so I was glad these were trouble-free.

Now, aren't these the cutest little soffit tenons you've ever seen?:

As you can see there are two lengths - the four longer ones are the through-tenons, and the shorter ones are mounted blind. The through tenons will be kerfed and wedged which will, it is to be hoped, help keep any potential tendency for the Ipe stretchers to move apart from one another in check. Essentially, I'm building this assembly combining the two stretchers and the crosspieces as if I were constructing a timber floor system.

Soffit tenons are a variation on the tusk tenon - much the same except that the bottom surface of the tenon is coincident with the bottom surface of the stick.

Then it was back to the Ipe stretchers to complete the mortise cut out with a final round of sidewall paring:

Time to try a fit with one of the through-tenoned crosspieces:

Fully inserted:

A look around the other side of the crosspiece to check the fit:

A view of the exit face:

More paring, this time on a blind mortise, and a trial fitting:

Another view:

Looking from the exit face's side:

Once the pieces were fitted, I checked each one for squareness to the stretcher, making adjustments if necessary:

Mortises done, I thought I may as well sling a few of them together to make sure the assembly goes together - first I fit the seven crosspieces onto one stretcher:

Then the other stretcher is started:

A few taps with a mallet later and it is together, square and flat:

Perhaps I could start a new sideline specializing in doll house ladders? Or, perhaps miniature pergolas?

Well this the pics for today's post. Hope all is well with you and yours, and if you celebrate Christmas in the commercial fashion may Santa make his way to your house with all the treats you've been longing for and the Grinch steers a wide berth. Thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way, and look for another post in this thread in a couple of days. Cheers!

Mix and Match (V)

2011-12-23T18:34:00.007-05:00

Managed to get a bit more done on this joinery project, a little addition to our household. Previous posts in this thread can be found by way of the 'blog archive' links section to the right of the page.

Next up in the process was a little mortising, with an emphasis on the word little. The smallest hollow chisel mortising bit I have is 1/4", and that was far too big for this task. I wanted to make 1/8" (3mm) peg mortises, and cutting a square hole that small was problematic even in light of the fairly extensive set of chisels I have on hand. While I have 1mm and 3mm chisels, they are tall in height and that means they can't get very far into a 1/8" size hole. If I did such small mortises regularly, I would get some custom chisels made, but in this case it is time to improvise I guess. First I marked out the mortises:

The knife marks are slightly inside their marks - they're there mostly to prevent any tear out while drilling. Then over to the drill press with a 1/64" undersize brad point drill bit (7/64" that is), a fence, and a packing piece to prevent blowout from the drill poking down inside the mortise:

I chose a wood even denser and stiffer than Jatoba for the pegs, a wood also from South America - Gonçalo Alves:

If I might be pedantic for a moment, the little squiggly mark under the 'c' in Gonçalo (called a cedilla) means the letter is to be pronounced like 'sah', not 'cah'.

With the mortises roughed out by drill, I used a square jeweler's file to transform their shape:

I filed until the peg was a snug sliding fit:

That's one down and seven to go.

This mini-me mortising was a fairly tedious job and took close to two hours to complete - the Jatoba was no picnic to file, especially on the end grain surfaces:

Thanks John for the use of your file!!

Then the panel tenons required mortising for the little pegs - these are elongated to allow for a bit of movement:

In case you're wondering, the mortises for the panel tenons are widened slightly to allow said tenons to move side to side a little. In my experience, with careful selection of material and grain for the panels, there is not much movement to worry about using mitered breadboard ends. Also, it's the dry time of year so the panels are likely at their narrowest, and the service environment for this piece is one which will limit humidity to a certain extent. Probably the potential for swelling is somewhat minimized. The Jatoba panel is pure vertical grain -- in short, I'm not anticipating much in the way of movement in service.

Next operation involved the Ipe stretchers, the same ones with the quintuple tenons. I used a kama kebiki to strike some lines for the mortises:

Then it was over to the hollow chisel mortiser, where I, uh, took the plunge:

The mortise is roughed out:

The two strechers, looking at the inside faces, mortising for the 1/4" x 1/2" tenons now complete:

Since the stretchers are essentially beams, I took care to locate the mortises close to the central axis of the pieces away from areas of tension or compression. While the loads on these 'beams' are trivial, the structural principle still guides the design.

Some more marking out with a knife was in order:

Then some rough chopping:

Followed by some paring:

A mostly complete squinted abutment, as they are termed:

The sidewalls of the mortise are a bit tight at this point and will be trimmed back slightly. The word squinted, by the way, means 'oblique', or 'sloped'. It's a wonderfully festive holiday word you can try to spring on unsuspecting relatives just as they are slicing into the turkey or wildebeest.

The two stretchers have all their mortises now roughed out. Final paring will wait until the cross pieces are fitted:

Next up are the cross pieces, and for a look at that, you'll have to come back for the next post. Thanks for visiting and as always, comments are welcome. ➸ on to post 6

Just Scraping By

2011-12-22T19:49:00.003-05:00

I have long been an admirer of Ming and early Qing period Chinese classical furniture. Not only is it aesthetically satisfying, but the pieces very much appeal to the purist in me as works of pure joinery. Many Chinese furniture pieces were in fact built to be knocked down for transport, and using glue was frowned upon and minimized. The way these pieces have traveled through time to the present with such grace and durability is a testament to the way they are made.

One thing that has always struck me though is that fact that classical Chinese furniture is made from extremely hard and dense wood species, like Rosewoods (huanghauli) from the dalbergia group, or Zitan a variety of pterocarpus, etc. Many of these woods have interlocked grain that are very difficult to work with hand tools. I have long wondered how Chinese craftsmen achieved such sublime results given the apparent crudity of their hand tools. I find these woods difficult to work myself even though I have the benefit of carbide and powered machinery for certain steps in the making process.

The Chinese used hand planes, however the ones I have seen do not particularly impress at a glance, at least as far as their blade metallurgy is concerned - often just stamped and heat-treated high carbon steel. Here's an example of a Chinese plane, from Shanghai:

Chinese planes are pushed, unlike Japanese planes which are pulled. The Japanese adopted the plane from China and made changes to it, including removing the handle and relocating the blade towards the front end.

I had thought that Japanese blacksmithing and laminated blade techniques likely also stemmed from China, however I had never seen reference to a Chinese plane with a laminated blade - until recently. I'm currently reading the work by Nancy Berliner entitled, Beyond the Screen: Chinese Furniture of the 16th and 17th Centuries:

Contained within is a section by noted specialist in Chinese classical furniture Curtis Evarts, a chapter called "The Furniture Maker and the Woodworking Traditions of China". On page 69 there is a the following illustration from the 15th century work the Lu Ban Jing:

That illustration I have seen on several previous occasions, including in a translation of the original text. I'd always noticed two things about that picture - the craftsman planing the table top, and the hexagonal table in the background. We can also see a chisel, a mallet, and a bow drill in the illustration, along with another curious looking tool which looks a bit like a miniature rake or comb.

The plane in China before the two-handed push plane appeared was the spear plane, which the Japanese also employed, and presumably adopted from China. The push plane developed some time before the Ming period (1368~1644). In the 1637 (incorrectly ascribed to a 1609 date by Evarts) technological treatise Tiangong Kaiwu (天工開物) by Song Yingxing, which may be loosely translated as "The Exploitation of Works of Nature" there is specific reference to the push plane:

"[The blade of] the common plane is made sharp with one inch steel laminated onto its cutting iron. It protrudes the smallest fraction at an angle from the opening of the [lower] surface, and therefore [it is used to] smooth flat the surface of wood."

Aha! So at one point in time the Chinese had laminated steel-iron cutting tools! That was a most interesting reference to come across. I wonder if any of those older laminated cutter are in existence anywhere? My impression is they're not made any longer for Chinese hand tools. Interestingly, original copies of Tiangong Kaiwu are now extremely scarce in China - however some were preserved in Japan, which indicates information about many Chinese technological practices was available in Japan at an early date.

As Evarts notes in Beyond the Screen,

"These references indicate that the quick and accurate bao evolved from the early planing knives and the spokeshave plane, and that is was not known in Japan before the sixteenth century, when the push plane was introduced from China. Although later Japanese woodworking tools are renowned for their excellent laminated-steel blades, it is clear from various passages in the Tiangong Kaiwu that Chinese ironsmiths in the late Ming period were still well-versed in the art of producing high-quality blades with steel forge-welded onto cutting edges. The dependence of carpenters on ironsmiths is made clear in Pu Songling's lines, "Ax and adze handles are cut and shaped by themselves, but plane blade, gouge, and saw [blade] all cost them money."

Later in the passage from the Tiangong Kaiwu there is a reference to another plane:

"... for scraping wood extremely smooth is called a "centipede plane" (wugong bao). Ten or more small knives are clinched within a wooden handle and look like centipede legs."

That my friends is what that funny little tool depicted in the Lu Ban Jing illustration above. The term wugong bao zi is written in Chinese characters as: 蜈蚣鉋子. The word for 'plane', baozi (鉋子), is often shortened just to bao (鉋). To add to the confusion, in modern simplified Chinese the character for plane is now '刨' or '刨子'. This modern replacement is a similar character, containing the same element '包', (meaning, wrap, envelop - actually the character derives from a pictograph of a fetus encompassed in a placenta/the womb), however the radical 'metal' (金), has now been replaced by 'sword/knife' (刀). Am I digressing too far? Perhaps...

Anyhow, the same character, '鉋', is used in Japanese also to mean 'plane', and in fact the word for centipede in Japanese (muka-de) is also written as 蜈蚣. The 'centipede plane' however does not seem exist in Japan as far as I can tell - if it was adopted, its use never became widespread. There may be one or two examples in the Takenaka Tool Museum in Kobe - if any readers happen to visit the museum, take a look and let me know.

This is what a centipede plane looks like:

Another one:

The blades are sandwiched into kerfs, or, in some versions, between intermediate spacers:

The centipede planes come in various versions, just like other woodworking planes - here are some rounding/beading centipede planes:

In this illustration one can see, second from left, a centipede plane for concave surfaces:

These come large and small:

Apparently, many craftsmen make their own centipede planes and these tools are still a part of the present-day Chinese woodworker's set of tools. The blades are fitted - apparently the last one in seems to wedge the lot into place, and then the cutting surfaces are dressed flat (or to some other required shape) with a file. Then each blade is beveled slightly. Seems like it would be a nightmare to set up such a tool, especially the non-flat/non-straight versions.

I was thinking about reasons why the Japanese didn't adopt such a plane, at least not on a wide scale. Perhaps the fact that Japan was pretty much closed up to trade during the Edo period (1603~1868), which followed shortly on the heels of the importation to the country of Chinese planes and other technical items, and that there are few indigenous wood species so hard and difficult to work as the Chinese huanghuali and zitan - wood that had become scarce and that China needed to import from the 13th century or so. The Japanese flowering of traditional arts which occurred during the Edo period would be one in which few imported materials of any kind would play a role. Even today, items made from ebony (kokutan) and other hard exotics are not particularly commonplace. Anyway, it' a theory and nothing more. I'd be interested to give a centipede plane a try one day, but meanwhile, when working with Ipe, curly Bubinga, vertical grain Jatoba, etc., I don't feel like I am straying too far from traditional practice when I resort to scraping the wood.

Mix and Match (IV)

2011-12-21T17:22:00.003-05:00

Another spot of work completed on this project. Heading into the shop today I knew that a few mortise walls needed paring, and in rock-hard Jatoba no less. So, I started out with a bit of sharpening. Then it was time to let the chips fly:

Some paring too of course, with the 5mm:

A more or less completed mortise cluster:

After cutting two set of mortises, I decided to see how the Ipe planed. Actually, on face grain, quite well:

On edge (vertical) grain, despite the plane being sharp, with a tight mouth, and a 60˚ blade bedding angle, I had a small bit of tear out on one of the Ipe pieces. this wood has interlocked grain, clearly. I decided to borrow the LN scraper plane from John upstairs:

That took care of the problem.

Well, it seemed like time for the Ipe and Jatoba to get acquainted with one another:

Both species are from South America- I wonder if they grow in proximity to each other?

The fit was tight, but not too tight. Here the tenons are about 3/4 of the way along:

Another couple of taps with the hammer and the tenons were fully seated:

Here's the other end being fitted, tenons not quite all the way through at this stage:

That one's not totally perfect, but I am pleased with the result. This is the first time I have cut this joint, and it always takes me a few go-rounds before I work out all the fitting issues with a given joint.

I then pared out the remaining pair of Jatoba legs, and thus reached the end of that road, at least prior to completing the fitting, which always seems to require another bit of paring here and there:

Time to fit another one:

All the way down, looking from the inside face:

I can see a small bit of gappage there, and tend to think that I could have housed the whole affair - or done a better job. I can live with it.

The exit side has no obvious gaps though:

One assembly sitting on the jointer:

And then both assemblies were done:

And both sitting on the jointer:

The joinery work was satisfying. The fits are very solid and I suspect that the joints would be adequately strong with just a pressure fit. I may yet add wedges, or maybe peg the central tenon. I'm making this up as I go along. Ipe apparently exudes a chemical called lapacho which makes it pretty much impervious to glue, including epoxy. Some people try wiping the surface with acetone or other solvents, and then gluing, but I've also read several people who have said, after much experience, that Ipe is impossible to glue and that glue will always fail - there's a discussion on Woodweb on the very topic. Well, I'm fairly used to putting things together without glue or metal fasteners, so this isn't a worrisome issue in the least.

There are a few more mortise and tenon joints associated to those Ipe stretchers, and that will be the subject of the next post. I hope you'll stay tuned. Thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way. ➸ on to post V

Mix and Match (III)

2011-12-20T18:02:00.003-05:00

Moving right along with post 3 in the series. I'm building something, using joinery and mis-matched bits of wood. A hack job really, but I'm having fun.

I ran out of the Jatoba so for the next bits I needed to dredge up some more material from my wood rack. Looking amongst the choices, which were hardly extensive, I decided that Ipe would be sound punishment for past transgressions. After a round of jointing and planing, I got out the small kebiki to mark out tenon shoulders:

Then I started to rough out the tenons with the router table:

For my own amusement, I decided it would be fun to do quintuple through tenons. Once roughed out, I pared the end grain to the line:

Another view- narrow side:

The completed tenons:

The Ipe seems like a combination of teak and lignum vitae in its working qualities. Not as hard as Lignum V, and not as abrasive as teak. It seems to have long cells and is quite elastic. It has fluorescent green dust in its pores, which reminds me a bit of Honduran Mahongany and the dust that that wood has in its pores. I wonder what the green dust is? Is it the missing ingredient in some sort of haute cuisine? Could I make big money off it?

So far so good with the Ipe, It machines cleanly and it will be interesting to see how it hand planes tomorrow.

I had time to get some mortising done too. I considered using my hollow chisel mortiser for this, but decided that the router was going to enable a more precise result. Here are the mortises roughed out in the four posts:

I'll pare those tomorrow and should be able to fir the parts together. A fair bit of mortise and tenon work to come yet.

All for today. With the writing work I have for the carpentry study group, along with other design work, I am only getting in half-days at the shop. The space is unheated and daylight limited, so it is just as well. ➼ on to post IV

Mix and Match (II)

2011-12-19T17:05:00.002-05:00

Making a little something for the kitchen and thought I'd string a few pictures together of the build process, the design aspect happening on the fly in this case.

So far no major disasters, and all fingers still accounted for - I did decide to drop the poplar from the project, and have reconfigured an altogether new arrangement in its place.

In the previous blog post I had formed tenoned tongue and groove joints on the ends of the two main panels. After that it was time to work on the mitered breadboard ends. After the usual rounds of sawing jointing and dimensioning the stock, I used a slot cutter in my router table to form the grooves on each piece. Then I marked out for the tenons and headed over to the hollow chisel mortiser, a 1/4" (6.35mm) bit chucked into position:

I used a 1/4" thick stick, on edge, to support the cut.

Then I rough cut the miters on the ends of each stick and had a go at a trial fitting for the mortises:

As expected, the fit was a bit too tight, so I eased the mortises slightly using a couple of chisels. Then it was time for another trial fit, in which things slid together pretty much as they should, up to the point where the breadboard's mitered ends made contact with the panel ends:

The tenons are cut to a length such that they are meant to protrude slightly at this stage, so I still have another couple of millimeters to go at this point:

The path to a closer fit involved a careful trimming of the end miters using a jerry-rigged shooting board:

Oh man, this part really bites!:

A few passes were taken:

Then the end of the stick was checked for squareness across the face of the miter. All was good so I rolled along trimming each end and checking, rechecking, until a good fit was achieved. Rather than sliding the breadboard end onto the tenons again, I check the fit by dropping the stick onto the housing directly, like this:

A while later, all four breadboard ends were grooved, mortised, mitered, and fitted:

Tsk, tsk, look at the mess I made:

All for today - thanks for visiting! I should have another post coming down the pike in a day or two, so hope to you you again then. ➼ on to post III

Mix and Match

2011-12-15T15:37:00.002-05:00

With no large projects or furniture commissions in play at the current time, I decided to make another small joined piece for the household, following on from the CD rack from a month back. This might not be the most interesting thread in the history of this blog, but it seemed worthwhile to take a few pictures as I moved along. To add a small amount of suspense, I won't reveal what it is I'm making until the end.it should become obvious soon enough I suppose.

While I have a few juicy slabs of wood in my pile, I really am unwilling to touch them unless the right project calls for them. This isn't such a project. So, I'm taking a scrap of this wood, and an off-cut of that wood, and putting things together. Matching colors is hardly my forte, and my hope is that whatever results does not look like an Abercrombi and Fitch patch-quilt rugby jersey by the time I'm done, or piece of kindergarten furniture.

So far, the woods in play include Jatoba, Black Cherry and Poplar. There may be other materials introduced into the mix yet. There will be no metal and probably no glue used.

I've come up with an interesting idea for some of the joinery on this piece. At least it's something I haven't seen before. Here's I'm working on an early stage in the process of cutting the joint, the wood being black Cherry:

After the end grain is cleaned up, I pare the sidewalls with the aid of an angled block:

Here, a couple of the Jatoba pieces are getting to know one another:

It's nice vertical grain material.

The Cherry also says 'hi' to the Jatoba:

Here, as you can see, I'm deforming the ends of the two boards with some vicious hacking:

Time for a little saw-work:

The board ends are getting a bit closer to final form now:

A closer view and a different camera angle on the Jatoba board:

Another view:

A little more sawing was in order:

Still not quite done, but getting a lot closer:

Well, things are heading somewhere it would seem. I haven't prepared any drawings this time and am very much making things up as I go along. Thanks for dropping by today. Comments always welcome.
➼ on to post II

Code Alert (II)

2011-12-14T10:24:00.001-05:00

As regular readers of this blog may remember, a few weeks back I made mention that I had begun taking a contractor licensing course. In Massachusetts, where I live, many trades are required to be licensed in order to perform most aspects of construction work. Electricians and plumbers are licensed, as are masons, crane operators, demolition supervisors, and building contractors, to list a few that come to mind. If it can be licensed, you can bet that Massachusetts will license it! This is a state positively in love with inspections and licenses. Things are very highly regulated here - and I come from Canada, which is supposed to be a quasi-socialistic worker's paradise (according to some US politician's accounts), so I guess this must be just like home. I have to take my truck, for example, every year for a state inspection, whereas in British Columbia, living rurally, I did not have to go for inspections, ever.

Massachusetts is unique in this regard in comparison to the surrounding states of the New England area. Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Live-free or Die New Hampshire, and Maine have no licensing requirements for construction contracting. In those states, a contractor only has to register his business with the state, and pay into a form of insurance fund against claims.In some of those states and towns therein, they don't even really have building code regulations or inspectors.

Massachusetts requires the same registering and payment into the insurance fund as those surrounding states, and on top of that a contractor who wishes to engage in any significant form of building work needs to obtain a license. If one doesn't obtain the license, then the only work a contractor could legally perform is that of basic home improvement tasks.

The contracting license is obtained by taking a timed exam. The subject of the exam covers the International Building Code (IBC), the International Residential Code (IRC), the Occupational Health and Safety Administration code (OSHA), the International Energy Conservation (IECC) code, and the Architectural Access code (for code regulations concerning the access of wheelchairs into buildings of all kinds). On top of the IRC and IBC code books, I there are also a slew of amendments unique to Massachusetts, and these require you annotate the main code books and are most careful when looking up certain things that you check to see if there is a state amendment which might affect the answer you're after.

For $650 I obtained the current versions of all of the aforementioned code books, and took a 7 session course to prepare for the exam. While it would be possible to take the exam without taking a course, all I could say is good luck to that! There's a lot of material to cover, and just learning how to find things in the various code books, including which code book to look in, takes quite a while to learn. The class I took met on Monday nights and typically lasted 3~3.5 hours. Then we had homework to take back with us, and this often took 3~5 hours to complete. I finished the course a couple of weeks back, and let me tell you by the end of it all I had pored through all those code books so many times I was sick of it! I must say that I learned a great deal in the process, and thought it was definitely worthwhile.

This week I sat the state exam. I should note that students taking this year's exam are guinea pigs of a sort in that they have made the exam significantly harder this fall than in previous versions. It used to be the case that the exam consisted of 3 hours and 60 questions, all open book. Our lucky group gets to take 75 questions, in the same 3 hours. Our course instructor had no idea why the exam was being made harder, and that it wasn't as if the pass rate statewide was 100% or that people were saying the test was easy. Far from it. There are courses for exam preparation being run in various locations in the state, and all of use took a practice exam on the 6th class. According to our instructor, our group was one of the few in which a significant percentage of the class (3 of the 8 people) were able to actually get through all the questions in the 3 hour time limit. Many other classes apparently had students reaching only as far as 65 out of the 75 questions. The pass line for the exam is 70%, so you need 54 questions correct out of the 75. If you only make it to 65 questions in the allotted time, that makes for a tough situation.

It seems like the pass rate for people taking the new exam version is likely to drop this time around, so if that happens I wonder what the testing people (Prometric, Inc.) will do in response to that. "Oops!"

Anyway, I was one of the three in my group who did complete and pass the practice exam, so I felt like my chances were good going into the real thing. I paid another $100 to take the exam, and drove about and hour and a half to Worcester Massachusetts to the Prometric test center Monday this week. I was the first in my study group to tackle the exam. I guess that makes me the guinea pig for the guinea pigs. I wanted to take it while the study was fresh in my mind.

You sit the exam at a computer and have to go through a security check at the test center very much akin to the airport. You can't wear a watch or other jewelry, carry a wallet or even a case for your pocket calculator, all because of the possibility the test maker may have a hidden camera concealed in those sort of items. You get your photo taken, and that photo is then printed onto your test form. They actually wand you for metallic objects, weapons, etc., before you can go into the testing room. There were also waivers to be signed of course. There's a 5 minute break in the middle of the 3 hour exam, in which you can leave the testing room. Upon re-entry, they wand you again!

In the course I took I was told that we would cover 80% of the questions we would likely see on the actual exam, however I found that only about 40% of the questions were familiar. It took me the full three hours to complete the exam, finishing with but one minute to spare. There were a 4 or 5 questions in the exam for which I simply could not locate an answer in the code books and had to make an educated guess. I was a bit surprised with how hard the exam was actually. Exam over, I packed up my books and went out into the proctor's room to await my result. If you pass, they only tell you that you passed, and don't tell you your actual score. If you don't pass however, they tell you which questions you got wrong. Curious way to do it.

Anyhow, I passed! Whew! So glad I don't have to look anything up in those code books for a while, let me tell you. Next I have to send my exam result form to the state, along with, you guessed it, another $150, so I can receive the actual license, which is good for 2 or 3 years. I am now licensed as an 'unrestricted' contractor, which means I can work on 1- and 2-family houses, along with commercial jobs up to 35,000 cubic feet in size. I will still need to obtain my Massachusetts registration as a Home Improvement Contractor (HIC), and pay into the insurance fund, which should soak up another $400 or so. When in doubt, pay the government some more money.

I'm hoping that having crossed this hurdle I will have an easier time obtaining carpentry work here in Massachusetts, and even if it doesn't make as much of a difference as I might hope in terms of securing jobs, I feel the process has been an educational one and that's always a plus in my books, if you'll excuse the lousy pun. To many potential clients, to see that the contractor is 'licensed and insured' is reassuring - if not a requirement from their insurer.

Thanks for dropping by the Carpentry Way. I'm working on a small bit of joinery work at the moment and will be sharing some pictures of that in the next few posts.

Masters of Modernism: I.M. Pei

2011-12-09T17:44:00.005-05:00

Okay, I'm no fan of modernism, which I associate most particularly to two adjectives: cheap and ugly. I know it isn't always welcome to comment on another person's creative endeavors, but there are cases where I feel compelled to do so. This is not meant as a personal attack, as I have never met I.M. Pei, and have no idea is he is a jolly nice fellow or not. It's his work though that manifests at least some aspects of his being, and it is his work to which I do confess to having had a certain reaction.

Sometimes I come across works of architecture that truly take the breath away, though not in a good way. The Lamar Building in Augusta, Georgia. Taking the upcoming quote directly from the building's website, we learn that the structure was originally completed in 1912, an example of the Beaux Arts style. Sometime in the 1970's, though...

"The projects that Holley convinced Pei to do in Augusta included the Augusta Coliseum, the Broad Street Streetscape, the Chamber of Commerce Building in the middle of Broad Street and a Penthouse for the Lamar Building. It was on one summer evening over dinner in the Castleberry Room at the Pinnacle Club that Holley pointed out the window for Pei to look at the Lamar Building and told Pei that he wanted him to design a Penthouse for the top of the building. Pei then took out his pad and sketched out what was to become the Lamar Building Penthouse. During 1975 Pei’s firm completed the detailed design and the Penthouse was constructed in that year. In many ways the Lamar Penthouse foreshadowed Pei’s work a decade later when he designed the pyramid for the Lourve. The juxtaposition of a modern glass angular structure with a classic, elaborately-carved sandstone historic building is a theme that is central to both the Lamar Building and the Lourve."

The result of the celebrated international master's work was truly, uh, well, you be the judge:

Such 'breathtaking vision' and 'clear design intent' manifests in an undoubtedly harmonious blending of styles. To be generous, this structure would look okay on a Star Trek set. Clearly, I'm not quite ready to understand the genius of this architect. What I like is how he paid homage to the existing style of the building as he took such bold steps into the world of glass, concrete and steel.

Doing some further research on Pei, I discovered his design talents seemingly knew no bounds, and his fame, like the some viruses, actually began spreading internationally. I'll keep my stare fixed on the US though for the time being - take the notorious John Hancock building in Boston, the tallest building in New England:

Again, note how seamlessly the structure blends in with the built environment which surrounds it. Well, maybe it doesn't look too much worse than other skyscrapers out there, but there is an entertaining bit of background story to this one. The budget of $75 million dollars was exceeded only slightly as the project came in at $175 million. Glass panes detached from the structure during construction, crashing to the street below and all the glass had to be replaced. That's what they means by 'cutting edge' I guess. The building developed a "nauseating sway", giving occupants motion sickness. A $3 million dampening device was installed, then it was discovered the structure was vulnerable to being felled by winds, and an additional $5 million was spent reinforcing the structure with bracing. What a success story! 'Architect' - from the Greek architekton, the 'master builder.' Hmm...

Not to be outdone, Cleveland decided to get in on the action, and Pei designed a new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Forbes Magazine lists it as one of the world's ugliest. You be the judge:

Only $84M for this! What deal! I can see a future re-purposing as a skateboard park.

On a similar theme, we have the Macau Science Center:

You know, when I see such wonders, a certain song from the distant past (1977) comes to mind:

Hey, it was one of the albums my parent had on hand when I first figured out to throw a record on the turntable...

Okay, I've had my fun for one day. I hope my sarcasm wasn't too much for readers. In the face of the evidence, of what modernism has accomplished so far- well, I guess it's post modernism now (and what exactly is supposed to come after that?) - I really wonder why jail time isn't being considered for some of these so-called designers. Where is the public outcry? Why do cites compete with one another to pay for what is really just poorly-built, short lived ugly crap? Is this ugliness really accruing status in some way? To whom? Is it about how much money they can waste? I have no answers, but I really do wonder.

Thanks for coming by on your travels today. Time to go and work some wood.

Smile and Wave (VII)

2011-12-08T12:36:00.002-05:00

A concluding look at some of the specialized tools used for Japanese plane set up and tuning. In the previous post I showed a variety of tools which are used for shaping the underside of the plane. In tandem with such tools, one needs a ready means of checking the base of the tool's profile. Straightedges in other words. These are called jōgi (定規), though the term straightedge, transliterated into katakana (an alphabet in Japanese intended expressly for words of foreign origin) has also crept into use in recent times. The standard and traditional jōgi is a pair of wooden sticks fastened to one another with stubby dowels or sliding dovetail keys:

The advantage to a wooden stick is that it may be used without fear of dinging the exposed blade edge. The disadvantage is that the wooden sticks will require tuning from time to time, and in reality, checking one stick to another stick is not a good means of obtaining flatness, any more than rubbing two sharpening stones together produces flatness. In order to obtain flatness using a transfer method like that, you would need three sticks. Also, though the edge of the stick is beveled, it is not beveled to a very acute angle, and if it was, the sharp arris would have poor durability.

As a result, many Japanese craftspeople use metal jōgi - here's an example:

It should be decently straight, however it is really more of a ruler. The continuous edge could damage a blade if the blade was at proper depth to take a shaving. And to actually check properly, the blade needs to be at cutting depth. The graduations along the edge of the tool also impair clean sighting along the sole of the plane.

Improving upon that, we have a more precise straightedge with no markings:

A better tool yet is this straightedge, which has a notch cut out along its edge to fit over the blade edge:

The nicest tool on the market, and the one I use myself, is this straightedge, which features a very precisely milled edge, and a adjustable hook on one end to fit against the back corner of the dai:

At some $200, it isn't for everyone, but it is a tool I trust, and must not, under any circumstances, drop on the floor or bang into other metal objects with. I like the protective leather case that comes with it.

Speaking of precision instruments, some people like to inspect the sharpened blade edge for defects. A jewelers loupe is commonly used, however a nicer tool is this one, offering 100x magnification:

For measuring the thickness of the shaving, the tool of choice among the kezurō-kai set is this spring-loaded affair by Mitutoyo, accurate to 0.001mm:

It's expensive.

Another type of jōgi for plane tuning is this inexpensive plastic gauge used for determining the blade's bevel angle:

There is no shortage of tools for measuring and checking in the world of Japanese planes.

For fitting the blade to the block, and making adjustments, there are a few specialized chisels. For those that configure their plane blocks with the tsutsumi ledge, a special type of gooseneck chisel is indispensable:

This form of chisel the Japanese term kote-nomi (鏝鑿) - that's pronounced koh-teh - and the above is one specialized form.

A key detail with these chisels is that the head needs to be of tapered form, shinogi-gata, to fit into the side grooves of the plane's mouth:

Another form to accomplish this same clearance is to have a raised rib, like in this kote-nomi by Tasai:

There are also kote-nomi with a double-ended cutter, which can trim pushing or pulling.

Another specialized chisel, and one which is very handy if the plane is to have a tsutsumi and a very tight mouth opening is this mouth-cutting chisel, or kuchi-kiri nomi (口切り鑿):

In use, this chisel is handy for getting into tight areas of all kinds:

Of course, for trimming the sides of those grooves, a slim chisel is required:

There is also a type of gooseneck chisel with an inverted head, or gyaku kote nomi (逆鏝鑿),which is used by some to trim the koppa-gaeshi inside the plane mouth if it can't be accessed from the other side:

For cutting out the side grooves in the plane's body into which the blade will be later fitted, a special type of saw is available:

Some people use a modified form of keyhole saw for that task.

Finally, there are the tools used for tapping out the plane blade and sub blade, a process termed ura-dashi (裏出し). While many forms of hammer can be used for tapping out (I use a Japanese boat hammer), here is one marketed especially for the task:

Also there are specialized tapping tools, like this one:

The tool has its own built-in anvil/support bar, which is actually sprung underneath.

Here's another form of tapping tool, used in concert with hammer:

For those without such a tool, a hammer needs a suitable anvil, or kana-toko (金床), of which there are numerous forms. Some people use the end grain of blocks of wood. The standard anvil, and the type that I use, however is a section of non heat-treated railway tie with rounded corners at one end:

There are several sizes of anvil available - the above pictured model is a smaller one.

Well, that went a few pictures more than anticipated. I wonder if I missed something? Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this trip down the rabbit hole of specialized Japanese woodworking tools associated to kanna set up and tuning. I hope the Japanese terminology wasn't too overwhelming.

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way.

Smile and Wave (VI)

2011-12-06T21:27:00.002-05:00

Just to round out his series dealing with the configuration of the kanna dai, I thought I'd look at some of the specialized tools which associate to the task of making adjustments, both in tuning the sole and in fitting the blade. In this post I'll cover the tools for the adjustment of the dai gliding surface.

Shaping the hollows and landings on the underneath surface of the block can be accomplished through a variety of means. I've seen an article in a magazine a few years back in which a card scraper is suggested as one way to do it, however I think this is not the best choice. While card scrapers can take thin shavings, they tend to do so in a somewhat uneven manner and it is more difficult to obtain a nice even surface with that tool.

Scraping however is the name of the game. What you want is a scraping blade or device which is rigid. There are a few different Japanese scrapers. An inexpensive one looks like this:

And works like this (or, as often as not, crosswise to the dai:

A bit more full-on version of the same tool looks like this:

A bit more upscale yet is this laminated scraper, which comes in two widths, 6cm and 9cm. Here's the 6:

And here's the 9:

In action:

Some folks adapt other scraping blades to use, for example sections of paper mill knives, and so forth. Here's one guy's homemade scraping blades:

The longer blade has a unique profile, and can be used in either direction:

The standard means of shaping the sole is by way of a scraping plane, generically called a tachi-ganna (立ち鉋). The prefix ta(chi)~ means ’upright’, a reference to the blade of the tool which is generally set at 90˚, though there are tachi-ganna with the blade +/- 5˚ from that setting. Another term used specifically for scraping planes meant for plane tuning is dai-naoshiganna (台直し鉋), the prefix nao(shi)~ meaning 'repair, tune'. These adjusting planes come in a variety of sizes, typically in the range of 30mm to 54mm. The size refers to the width of the blade, by the way.

A tachi-ganna, at a fairly typical size for adjusting 65~70mm planes, of 42mm:

Tachi-ganna can also be obtained with the blade in a corner-cutting configuration, where they are termed kiwa-tachi-ganna (際立ち鉋):

Here's a 42mm dai-naoshiganna - note how the lower arrises are planed down quite a bit:

The purpose of planing the arrises down, a beveling which is taken right up to the corner of the blade, is so that you can see from the side the line you are planing crosswise. Typically, when planing near the landings, setchi, one uses a homemade wooden 90˚ fence to guide the plane across. There is also a commercially available fence which looks like this:

The slot acts a viewport so you can see where the fence is in relation to the mouth and the blade's edge.

Next time I'll look at the specialized tools involved in fitting the blade to the block. Thanks for coming by!

Smile and Wave (V)

2011-12-05T14:48:00.001-05:00

A series of posts looking at the set up of the Japanese plane block, or dai, prompted by a 1993 article in the magazine American Woodworker. That article depicted two different set-ups for Japanese planes: one for 'roughing and smoothing' and another for 'trueing' (sic). In the 3rd installment of this thread, I went over the set up for 'roughing and smoothing', where I am in agreement with the author of the A.W. article, Toshio Odate.

In the previous post, I described some reasons why Odate's illustration (or whoever drew it) of a truing plane was erroneous. In fact, I concluded that such a set up could ultimately only produce surfaces which are convex along their length. Furthermore, it is a plane set up nearly guaranteed to produce tear out as there is no support for the shaving just ahead of the blade edge. If any readers out there are unconvinced by my explanation, well, don't take my word for it: set up a plane just as the article suggests and see what sort of surface you can produce.

So, that begs the question of how one should set up a plane for truing work, and that is the topic of today's post.

Let's just consider for a moment a wooden plane set up with a dead flat sole, no hollows or landings:

Would this plane take a shaving? Well, yes, it would - the blade is tapped down until it protrudes a certain amount below the bottom of the sole and when pulled along, a shaving would come out of the mouth of the tool. This plane is no different, except in regards to the relative position of the blade along the length of the block, from a wooden western plane. Western wooden planes, along with the metal-bodied planes, take shavings with their dead-flat (hopefully!) soles.

Now, as explained in a previous post, the Japanese plane's dai is hollowed in certain locations, and the reason for this is to facilitate tuning (less surface to adjust and align) and to create certain effects by the interface of the planes touch-zones, setchi, with the wood upon which the plane is being pulled. I examined this issue in post 3 with a look at the set up for a smoothing plane. If I take the plane shown in the first illustration and relieve the working area in advance of the cutting edge, just as I had done with a smoothing plane, we would have something like this:

The area towards the head of the plane block, left side of the above picture has been left alone - no hollows or setchi. Would this plane take a shaving? Yes, it would. The only difference to the first illustration is that a hollow with two landings has been created. Now, the benefit of the landings in terms of the pre-compressing and slight stretching if the wood prior to cutting is not going to happen in the above arrangement, for the simple reason that the flat surface uphill (left side of the drawing) from the blade keeps the dai from being able to sink slightly down into the wood as it is pressed down and pulled. The benefit of having less dai surface to work on for tuning would be the, um, sole advantage to the hollowing. Couldn't resist a pun there.

A plane set up to true a surface needs to have a longer reference to the surface than a plane for smoothing. The smoothing plane, after all, is meant to be run along a surface that is already flat, true, out of wind, etc. The truing plane might be running along a surface that is undulating, cupped or bowed. It is an advantage to remove material from the sole in places that are not supporting the shaving or necessary in terms of giving that reference to the surface. If you take illustration 2, and consider where wood could be removed without affecting the shaving or the reference, you would end up with the following:

This is a plane set up for truing work - it has 3 touching points, landings, on the wood. These three landings need to be coplanar to one another and without wind.

Now let's look at a cross-section view of the same plane:

Click on any of the drawings for a larger picture.

Next, a closer look at the area on both sides of the plane's mouth:

The setchi on the right of the blade's edge remains to support the shaving, while the material immediately to the left of the blade, towards the head of the plane, is relieved - 0.2~0.3mm is suggested. A truing plane generally is not taking long continuous shavings until the surface is getting quite flat. most of the time when working with a truing plane the cutting tends to skip here and there as high spots are decked down.

The depth of the hollows of the plane relates to the density of the material worked and the thickness of shaving sought. Like the kanna with two landings, the hollow depth and mouth opening are related to thickness of shaving and material being planed.

Someone asked in a previous comment on this thread if I could specify depths of hollows for different woods, and the answer to that is, I can't. A given variety of wood can vary quite a bit in it's density, even within a given board. Douglas Fir and Honduran mahogany are two in particular which I find to be highly varied. Tree genetics is varied within a species as it is, and add to that soil conditions and other environmental factors and the resulting wood can range quite a bit in working quality. It's not plastic, it's not predictable. And even assuming the stack of wood you have is relatively homogenous in working quality, even that aspect will vary with the day as humidity goes up and down. There are simply too many variables to allow for some table of values specifying plane sole configuration to be set up.

Those looking for 'plug and play', 'set and forget', throw the headphones on and groove to some tunes while getting through the day, and are tending to be impatient in their work, won't find kanna a good choice. They are capable of taking superb shavings and leaving behind a glassy surface, however like solid wood itself, the process of achieving excellent results is an iterative one and people expecting instant successes with such a tool are likely to encounter frustrations. Try working on very expensive pieces of wood with little room for error and you will find a kanna can be your greatest friend or greatest source of stress.

The craftsperson, if they hope to achieve good results, needs to be mentally present and attuned to what they are doing. That's the bottom line. On any given day, or even portion of the day, the kanna is changing with humidity. If you're pulling thick shavings, the slight changes in the tool - which even arises from the heat of rubbing the tool along the surface - probably won't be noticeable. However it is when one needs to thin the shaving right down then all the myriad details really start to count. You set the tool up as best you can, take a shaving and see what happens - and adjust from there. You might be adjusting the blade position, sub-blade position, of configuration of the sole. Then you take another shaving and see what you get. And repeat until the tool is working as you desire. And what you desire, what you think is a good result, is, let me tell you, a non-fixed horizon. The better you get at planing, the more refined your idea of 'good' performance is likely to become. You'll be freaking out over gaps of 1/100" and others may think you are a little nuts.

Frankly one of the great advantages of wooden planes is their changeable nature and the fact that the craftsman has to be really attuned to the tool to get the most out of it. Increasing depth of understanding with a wooden plane inevitably means increasing sensitivity to the medium we are working. The kanna moves and wood moves - how do you deal with that? Developing facility with the use of kanna is very similar really to becoming skilled at playing a wooden musical instrument. The strings of the violin are continually pulling on the neck of the tool and may be stretching or changing in the humidity, and the musician recognizes when the instrument is going out of tune and compensates accordingly. And the zone of what an accomplished musician may consider to be 'properly tuned' is probably a heck of a lot narrower in scope than the less-skilled musician. And if you're not a musician, you may not even be able to tell the difference!

All that said, generally speaking, the softer the wood and the thicker the shaving desired, the deeper the hollows - up to 0.6mm with truing and roughing planes - and the wider the mouth opening. And vice-versa. If you had a soft wood with grain issues, then you wouldn't simply follow such generalizations - probably you would wish to use a plane with a narrower mouth, more closely set sub-blade, and so forth.

There is another variation on the set up of the sole of a kanna I wanted to uh, touch on here. There are longer jointing planes which are called nagadai-ganna (長台鉋), the prefix naga- meaning 'long'. These can be set up with an additional touch point in the middle of the main hollow, as follows:

A cross-section view of the waves:

On even longer dai, some people also put an intermediate landing on the front end (left side of the illustration above), as that portion of the tool becomes greater. These planes are often set up to be used with shooting boards, and depending upon which hand does the pulling, have the relevant adjacent side of the tool set at 90˚ to the sole.

That's about it for my look at Japanese plane sole tuning, general in nature as it may have been. I may do some future posts on other aspects of Japanese plane set up and tuning.

One final note: when you look back to post 2 in this thread, you can observe how planing ideally goes - note that the shaving produced in the first pass comes out flat, and does not curl. Several Japanese sources indicate that a flat, or even reverse curl shaving is considered good, while a up-curling shaving is considered a sign of incorrect plane set up:

Left side example is 'good', right side example is 'bad'. The combination of factors which produce such ideal shavings I'll leave for readers to explore for themselves. The shavings tell the story, it's up to you to learn how to read.

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way. Comments always welcome.

Smile and Wave (IV)

2011-12-03T16:48:00.003-05:00

In the previous post I looked at the configuration of a Japanese plane sole in the context of finish planing. Actually, the set up shown, in which two landings, or setchi, are the only places on the sole which contact the wood to be surfaced, can be used on planes for roughing (ara-shiko) or intermediate smoothing (naka-shiko). The finer the shaving sought, the smaller the mouth and the slighter the hollowing on the sole. The crucial part in terms for obtaining a good shaving is the relationship between the well-bedded cutter and the setchi immediately adjacent to it. That landing is what is supporting the shaving as it is sliced, and is the portion of the tool which is last in line in terms of the compressing and stretching effect on the material which the landings and the hollow between them make possible. That landing is a critical aspect of the tool. If the blade of your tool is sharp and you're having problems with tear out, then the likely most profitable area for examination is going to be that setchi next to the blade, the mouth opening, and the ramp inside the mouth which the shaving breaks along, termed the koppa-gaeshi. In this case I'm talking about a 'simplified' example where a single-bladed plane is used - if your plane has a chip-breaker/sub-blade, then its tuning and set up also has a significant role to play in dealing with tear out. I may cover that topic in a future blog.

In post 1 of this thread I mentioned an article by Toshio Odate which features an illustration of a plane set up for jointing or truing wood, and stated that the drawing was incorrectly detailed. Let's look at it again:

This drawing, along with the text associated to it, suggest that the kanna rides on two setchi, one at the back of the plane (right side of the illustration) and one at the head of the plane (left side). Besides showing the setchi as having a sharp ridge-like shape which would wear out quickly, the drawing indicates that the blade sticks down so as to be on a level line with the two setchi. There is no landing next to the blade, which means the shaving is unsupported and the chance of tear out rather high. The compression and stretching effect would not be present, as there is no landing immediately before the cutter, which would seem to negate the whole point of hollowing out the bottom of the tool. In a very soft wood, firmly pressing down on the plane while pulling would cause the two landings to bury slightly into the board, and that might be deep enough to bring the cutter and the portion of the dai just before the cutter into a position where a shaving might be taken without tear out, however again the pre-compression function is lost. In a harder wood, the plane's two landings would not bury in at all, and in order to obtain a shaving one would have to tap the blade until it projected slightly beyond the plane established by the two landings. Already the drawing shows a blade projection of 0.012", about 0.3mm. That's already a fairly heavy cut, one typically associated with a dai mouth opening of about 2mm. The mouth opening on the drawing would appear to be quite a bit tighter than that, though no mention is made in the article of a suitable mouth opening size. If we pulled the plane along a dead flat surface, as configured in the above drawing, it would not make any cut. But that does not mean therefore that such a plane configuration can produce a dead flat surface.

Some might think that if the plane were pressed down in hard wood that the dai would flatten out and their would be shaving support near the cutting edge. The problem with this, besides the already mentioned absence of the pressure bar effect, is that this would be too physically demanding to plane with heavy down pressure all the time. Imagine planing 8 hours a day with such a gem of a tool. As one fatigued, there would be times when even downward pressure could not be maintained - what sort of delicious cutting would we have then? Think about how a powered planer does when a board is wallowing up and down as it is fed through the cutter. And what is planer snipe after all but a change in down pressure during a cutting process?

The Japanese ideal is that the plane should be sharpened and set up so well that it will cut by tilting the board and letting the plane slide down - its own weight will be sufficient to make the plane cut as it slides. This may be folklore, and while I have seen planes pulled with strings making very nice cuts, the point is that one does not set up a hand tool so that pronounced force is going to be needed to operate it. The same goes for putting furniture together - if you need 3000 lb clamps to get things together, then let's face it: the fit isn't good between the parts.

Anyway, the illustration states that the "blade edge is even with front and back of plane to flatten high spots". I imagine they must be alluding to a situation like the following:

If you click on the illustration, you'll see a high spot on the wood surface (special blue wood that comes from Pine Beetle damaged forests :^)) in front of the blade. I'm going to suspend disbelief for a moment and presume that was have an absolutely magical combination of blade sharpness, sub-blade set, and happy cooperative wood so that tear out just doesn't happen. It's a different sort of universe than the one I inhabit, and I am jealous. I could see that in the other universe, with boards that have small raised bumps here and there, bumps which are but a fraction of the length of the plane sole, that such a magical plane set up could trim those lumps down.

Now, that little bump in the previous picture could be on either end zone of the board. Or the bumps could be spaced inconveniently, as in this hypothetical situation:

In which case, moving the plane along would cause it to ride up on the bumps and not make the cut on the middle bump:

So it would seem that only on boards which had a few selected and widely-dispersed bumps, none of which were close enough together to be 'in phase' with the landings on the sole, would this plane do much to true such a surface. I don't know about you, but wood with scattered small bumps is not something I have come across too often, not am I aware of any special axing or adzing work which would produce such a surface. Let's set that aside for the moment however.

In my universe, 'truing' a board would most typically entail making the entire board flat, which is to say, I make all places on the board into a single plane, and that plane is at the depth of the greatest low spot on the board surface when I begin work. Let's say we had a fairly flat board to begin with, and start planing at the end of this board. Here, I've placed the rear landing on top of the board, and the plane is sectioned in half so the blade position is more apparent:

As I pull the plane forward, it will ride down the hollow on the sole, unless you are one of those people of infinite skill who can hold the plane perfectly horizontal, blade suspended in mid air. When the end of the hollow is reached, the blade edge says hello! to the corner of the board, like this:

The depth of blade projection is the thickness of shaving we wish to take, so I guess we're hogging off a 0.3mm shaving, the 0.012" mentioned in the article. We're young and strong and the wood is that magical soft kind which yields like butter - we pull along taking a great whacking shaving. A little further and the front landing on the plane wants to say hello! to the board too:

Since the shaving we took with the blade means the surface is 0.3mm lower there at the board end when the front landing arrives, even with the front landing now sitting on the wood the entire plane would be at a slight tilt, like a car carrying too much weight in the trunk. The blade is still engaged in the surface, albeit climbing slightly as the front landing is engaged, and therefore now at a shallower depth of cut. If you followed the progress of the cut along further, you will see that the plane would eventually make the surface of the board convex along it's length. The process which happened at the start of the cut would be more or less mirrored at the end of the cut as the front landing passed the board and and the plane rode down the dai hollow once again. If the blade was exactly centered in the dai (which it isn't) the cut would be equally convex at each end. More passes would only continue the process. If you think about it, the only sort of surface this plane could produce would be a convex one along the length of the board. Or 'bowed' if you prefer that term.

That first example was with a board which was quite flat to begin with. Presumably a 'truing' plane would be able to handle boards which are bowed in or out along their length at the outset, as in these two examples:

In either case though, the, er, dai is cast - this plane can only produce a convex surface if worked along an entire board. That's an awfully specialized sort of plane now isn't it? It will not be able to plane the middle of the lower board in the picture above until it has made the ends quite thin - and one would find oneself taking thick shavings, doing a lot of work, and producing bowed boards. Is that how the Japanese do it? Is this the magic touch of the master craftsman you've heard about? Not quite.

In the next post I'll show a better way to set the plane up for 'truing' a board. I hope you'll stay tuned and thanks for your visit. ➛ on to post 5

Smile and Wave (III)

2011-12-01T14:21:00.007-05:00

Part 3 in a series.

A few things on my mind which I thought were worth addressing before moving onward in this thread. I greatly appreciate the comments on previous posts along with some of the emails I have received otherwise. This seems like a topic which engages more than a few folks out there.

Apologies at the outset to those who might feel irritation at seeing thin plane shavings, or who feel that the point of using a plane is to produce a certain kind of surface, in a certain profile, and that the shavings are something that we throw away or use as fire-starter, unless you're in the business of producing excelsior for packing crates, erosion control mats and so forth.

Who cares about shavings? Well, I do. You see, the biggest clue to solving the mystery of obtaining optimal plane performance is given by the shaving. It tells you everything you need to know, providing you know how to read it. The shaving reveals whether your blade is sharp, and how clean the edge is, whether the blade is bedded properly or deflecting/vibrating, how even the blade protrusion is on each side of the mouth, how the chip breaker is set, and so on and so forth.

I also well understand the reaction some might have had to seeing the video of the plane shavings in the previous blog entry for this thread, who may have found the whole thing somewhat artificial or perhaps an excessively narrowly-focused aspect of woodwork. I've had that response myself to the very same material at past points in time. Hypertrophy of a narrow skill can indeed be a distortion and 'unnatural'. I think that some might have a certain reaction of resentment or anger to seeing the outcome of another person who has dedicated themselves to a given task, focused on it in an 'anal-retentive' manner and done something difficult.

Finally I want to say, despite mention of a gauntlet being thrown down and all, I have plenty of respect for Western planes, own a few myself, and admire those who make tools and strive to make improvements in their design and performance.

At the end of the day though, we're left with a clear impression, in seeing that video, and the accompanying pictures, of a result, of a type of shaving that cannot, as far as I know, be produced with a Western planes despite their many sophisticated aspects. Yes, it was a certain type of 'perfect' material that was being planed, and I myself have often thought it would be cool to see a planing contest organized around very tough-to-plane material with interlocked grain, silica, and other horrors. But you know what? The same sort of excellent results would likely be realized if that was the type of contest. The shavings would likely be not as sublime as are pulled off of AYC, and the surface produced may not be as glassy, but I think you would see people obtaining excellent results in difficult to work materials, like curly Purpleheart, Lacewood, and so forth. There are plenty of hardwoods worked in Japan by cabinetmakers, including ebony, teak, rosewoods, etc., and excellent results are obtained by planing. At the temple complex in Kyoto known as Daitokuji, I have seen a 4' wide by 20' long floor board made of a single piece of a hard tropical wood - planed to a glassy sheen without any tool marks. This happened well before the days of the wide belt sander. Another Kyoto temple, Nishihonganji, is framed entirely in Japanese Elm, the main building as long as an athletic field with posts around 18" thick:

And if you were going to set up a planing contest/meet that people would enjoy taking part in, it would make sense to choose a type of wood that was capable of producing excellent quality shavings and coming up nice and glossy. If only a few participants could obtain decent shavings, and the rest were stymied, they might not find it such a lark. You would want a wood that is fairly readily available and straight-grained. AYC is one such wood. And the set up of a plane which was ideal for AYC would not be the same as for other woods. So, no matter what wood you chose, there would be a way of configuring a wooden-bodied plane to obtain excellent results. That I'm sure of.

My response to seeing the skill of planing at such a high level, after the initial reflection that my own skill pales in comparison, is to feel inspired. I like to have an idea of what is truly possible, and I like the confrontation of seeing such a demonstration and then the resulting process of problem-solving that may lead me closer to obtaining such a result myself. As my friend and former co-worker Mike Laine wrote to me recently,

"It would be interesting to see how many of the serious competitors in the blue ribbon round at the planing contest are professional carpenters/woodworkers, and how many are research freaks/curious hobbyist. That being said, I would freak out if I ever was able to pull a shaving as done in the video you posted."

Me too!

Anyway, preamble aside, I want to continue this look at configuring the sole of a kanna. as I mentioned in the previous posting in this thread, the sole of a Japanese plane is not flat but has hollowed areas. There are several ways in which these hollows are arranged. Today I want to look at the case of a shiage-ganna, or finishing plane, and how the sole is typically configured. Here's a sketch:

The plane block, or dai, has only two areas of primary contact with the wood to be planed - a band of wood at the back (right side of the drawing) and one immediately next to the mouth. I've colored the bands in the above drawing to make them obvious. These bands of wood are termed setchi (接地) in Japanese - in English we might call them landings or grounding points. The hollows between the landings, and on the uphill side of the blade, the Japanese call sukima (隙間), and hollowing the sole of the plane suki-tori (隙取り). The landings, setchi, are varied in width. The narrower they are the faster they will wear down. So, depending upon the type of wood you are planing, in terms of it's density and abrasive qualities, the width of the landings might vary a certain amount. The landing at the rear end of the plane (closest to you when you pull the tool towards yourself) is typically 10~15mm wide. The lead edge of that setchi must have a crisp corner so as to push wood debris, grit and dust aside as the plane is pulled along. If junk gets underneath there it will possibly cause the plane to ride up slightly off the surface and cutting will be affected, or it may become lodged and mar the surface being planed. The other setchi, immediately next to the blade, is typically in the range of 5~12mm in width. The setchi in front of the blade takes the greatest brunt of the wear, both from hand down pressure in that area, as the shaving is lifted off the wood and dragged over the edge of the mouth and into the plane's throat.

The hollowing of the sole of the plane is done in a shallow wavelike form. In the following illustration, I show that wave in a greatly exaggerated manner:

The wave drops to its deepest point quickly as we move off the setchi on the right side of the drawing, moving from right to left. From there it ramps upward gradually to the setchi at the blade. The deepest point of the hollow will vary in depth depending upon the type of wood being cut and the thickness of shaving being taken. The thicker the shaving, and softer the wood to be worked, the greater the depth of the hollow. This is the same sort of thing with the mouth of the plane - thick shavings means a greater blade protrusion and larger mouth, thinner shavings a tighter mouth and shallower blade protrusion.

For a final finishing plane, with the tightest mouth (say 0.30mm wide), the depth of the hollow is between 0.05mm and 0.10mm, and the drop off from the blade to the front end (the part of the plane furthest from you while pulling the plane) drops off a similar amount.

A preliminary finishing plane, with a more open mouth (@ 0.5mm wide) might have a hollow with a depth of 0.10~0.20mm, and the front end tapers off at the front edge to a depth of 0.05mm and 0.10mm.

A roughing plane with two contact points will have a fairly open mouth (@2.0mm), a main hollow 0.20~0.30mm deep, and the front end drops off from the blade 0.20~0.30mm by the time it reaches the front edge.

Here's a closer look at the mouth area:

The landing in front of the mouth, if you want to take the thinnest of shavings, needs to be on the narrow end of the spectrum - the narrower it goes though, and the more abrasive the wood being planed, the more often the sole will need retuning.

The wood immediately to the front of the blade (on the left side of the blade in the above sketch) is a small ledge to help support the blade's bevel, and is termed the tsutsumi (包み). That ledge is not a critical piece of the puzzle and many planes lack a tsutsumi.

Here's a common problem with the tuning in this area, and I thought it worth a mention.

What is most critical in the plane set up is that the tsutsumi, and any wood near it, is not deformed downward too much with the blade fully inserted - to the point that the wood bulges down to, in effect, form another setchi (landing). At most, with the blade fully inserted, the wood in the dai pressed down by the fit of the blade can project to a point even with the setchi depth - actually, often it is set so as to be a shaving depth below the setchi when the blade is in postion. If the wood on the dai supporting the blade is not adjusted properly, the blade being tapped down into position will push that supporting material in the dai down so as to form another setchi, and thus render the setchi at the cutting edge suspended. At the same time, the pressure will actually tend to deform the blade itself, pushing the middle of the blade up in a direction opposite - again, the drawing is somewhat exaggerated:

The result of such a configuration will be that the plane won't cut, except perhaps at its corners. The corners cannot deflect so much since they are in line with the edges of the blade, which are trapped in the fitting grooves in the dai. If the plane does cut full width, it will tend to dig in in an inconsistent manner, and the shaving will be thin in the middle and thick at the edges. The bowed upward blade, if fitted into a tight mouth opening, will now be blocking the passage of the shaving in the middle zone of the mouth. The shaving will tell you all you need to know. At this point, while the blade might be razor sharp and a sighting down the block confirms blade projection (though likely not so much in the middle, but more at the blade corners), some might be tempted to try tapping the blade even further down, or fiddle with the side to side setting, or second guess themselves about whether they sharpened the blade with enough of a smile on it or not. In such a situation, because the plane is riding on the material in front of the blade (again, by front I mean the wood to the left of the blade in the preceding drawing) and not on the setchi as it should, the cutting action will be poor. The proper fit of the blade in the block is a tricky matter - you want a tight fit but not so tight that the blade or dai is deflected too much. In any case, since the dai will likely deflect at least a small amount by tapping the blade down into position, it is normal to slightly hollow the area around the tsutsumi so that it becomes flat when the blade is fully seated.

Dialing in the interplay between the setchi, the depth of the hollow, and the sharp, well-bedded blade is probably the most important determinant in obtaining good cutting action with a kanna. That's putting aside variances in humidity, mental state, and material.

In the next post I'll look at some other arrangements of setchi. Thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way.

➛ on to part IV

And then a light bulb went off...

2011-11-30T11:51:00.004-05:00

The recent premature death of my computer's speaker system, along with the recent lunacy observed in connection to the frenzy known as Black Friday, with people pepper spraying other shoppers to get what they wanted, etc., had me thinking about consumer society. That led in short order to the topic of pre-planned obsolescence once again. Funny how I often end up in the same place! By chance I came across an interesting video which deals with this topic in some detail, called somewhat ominously The Lightbulb Conspiracy. Thought I would share it here in case readers hadn't seen it. A bit less than an hour in length. There's an icon on the lower right corner to click if you want to go full screen:

I'd heard about extremely long lived light bulbs before, but didn't realize people we even throwing birthday parties for such things. Well, I can't help but say, in light of a 100 year old bulb, more power to them!

Smile and Wave (II)

2011-11-29T15:23:00.006-05:00

Since discussions of the nuances of Japanese plane set up can get a little arcane, perhaps, I thought I would ground this all in a short video clip which shows just what sort of shavings a well tuned Japanese plane is capable of taking:

The wood is Alaskan Yellow Cedar, which the Japanese call bei-hiba. I have yet to see anyone produce a comparable effort with a Western plane of any kind. Yes, that was a gauntlet being thrown down.

There must be more to this simple assembly which consists of a block of wood and a couple of bits of metal. A crude and archaic tool it would appear - with no fancy adjusting mechanisms, no peened dovetail joins, no polished infills contrasting with buffed bronze surfaces.

Now blades, some would say, are blades - just a piece of steel we sharpen. And there are all sorts of steels used for plane blades. Let's say for a moment, hypothetically, that whatever steel is being used in Western plane blades (and the current popular ones seem to be A2 and O1) can be made just as sharp as a Japanese blade. Irrespective of edge retention, one would think that a Western plane, with a perfectly tuned assembly and dead flat sole, could produce shavings comparable to a Japanese plane, at least for a pass or two. The word though, is comparable. Shavings like this?:

And the fellow who set up the above plane - or should I call him the magician - can do the same thing with a bunch of his other planes, whether set up with a single blade, as above, or with chip-breaker:

A shaving of 0.003mm seems to be the practical limit - that's about 0.000118" for those wondering. Yep, 1/10,000" thick. Does the word gossamer work here, or do we need another term?

Years back, I wrote to Karl Holtey, the esteemed metal plane maker, and mentioned that some Japanese freaks of nature were obtaining shavings down to 3 microns, and he flat out wouldn't believe me. He suggested I misunderstood what a micron was. It sounds crazy I guess - beyond the realm of the possible. At that juncture I didn't have handy access to images I could send him, but at this point I'm not feeling there is much point in following up. He makes great tools for a pretty penny, but where are the sub-10 micron shavings? How about a plane blade that can do 1000 meters of wood shavings at sub 10-micron, as some Japanese blades have done on a single sharpening?

Sure, the blade's steel/iron architecture, geometry, the sharpening media and technique all play a role. In the West though we have all sorts of apparent advantages. We've got lasers, CNC and other magic. There are many kinds of fancy sharpening jigs on the market, and the range of water stones available, both natural and artificial, is greater than it has ever been in history. There are many sites and books out there in English devoted to the topic of sharpening. We have 'Scary sharp', we have hollow grinding, we have secondary bevels, Tormek grinders with attachments galore, strops, diamond paste, etcetera. That's all fine, but I wonder at times if it is nothing more than so much mental masturbation on the topic, if I might characterize it somewhat rudely. Maybe it is a case of losing the forest for the trees. Those with the most expensive metal-bodied planes are not producing shavings anything similar to the above photos and video - at least none I have heard of or seen. The predominant concern, from what I have read on sharpening in the West, is how to make it easy and quick. Sharpening: an annoyance and a chore to be dealt with expeditiously and nothing more. In fact, sharpening is likely the most under-developed aspect of western woodworking despite all the gadgets. Most woodworkers I have met avoid sharpening their tools, yet is sharpening not the very foundation of woodworking? But that might be besides the point - there are Western sharpening fanatics out there to be sure.

Why, as it would appear, cannot a Western plane obtain shavings that thin? Given that there are no shortage of plane fanatics in the Western tradition, so one would think with all the precision inherent in a metal-bodied plane that obtaining full blade width micron-range shavings would be a regular, almost hum-drum affair. Doesn't technology always produce greater and more fantastic improvements with each new breathtaking development?

I would suggest the answer lies less with the blade and more with the support structure for that blade. The dai of a Japanese plane, that crude and temperamental block of wood is a big piece of the puzzle. The base of the Japanese plane block is not flat - it is wave-shaped.

Why is it wave-shaped? Well, one reason is that it speeds up the tuning process, much like the hollowing of a Japanese chisel or plane blade greatly speeds up the flattening of the tool's back. But that is actually a minor reason, since wood is relatively easy to re-shape, unlike that cutting steel hardened to Rockwell 65.

Some say that the sole of the kanna is hollowed so as to reduce gliding friction, and that may well be a side-effect of the hollowing, but the friction between the plane dai and the wood is not exactly much to overcome, and a wipe of wax on the sole would appear to solve that problem in short order besides. So, that's not it. The plane is not hollowed for the purpose of reducing gliding friction - in fact, a certain amount of friction is crucial to the function of the tool.

The shaping of the sole of a Japanese plane has everything to do with the effect of the plane's running surface on the wood underneath. Specifically, and most importantly, the shape of the dai undersurface immediately in front of the mouth - the portion laying just ahead of where the blade takes its bite. By having a band of wood in front of the blade - a landing as many call it - which is lower than the portion of the dai leading up to it, a zone of increased pressure is created directly underneath that landing when the plane is pressed down and pulled. As the wood to be planed is passed over by that landing, it is compressed and stretched slightly. Obviously, softer and more elastic woods manifest this effect more than hard and brittle woods. Just as the landing passes a given portion of the wood to be planed, the material is starting to uncompress and recoil - and that is the moment when the blade edge engages it. This process is somewhat akin to shaving, where stretching the skin against the direction of cutting stands the hairs up straight, holds them more firmly taut, and enables the blade to slice them more cleanly.

Another, and perhaps minor side effect of the pressure bar is that the wood underneath the bar receives more concentrated load and friction and thus heats up slightly, albeit briefly, since wood is not a good conductor. The warmer wood cuts better, as heat softens the wood slightly. You may wish to compare this idea to that of the slicing or peeling of veneer logs. The logs are heated prior to being cut - oak apparently cuts better at 200˚F, and some dense tropicals require up to a week of heating from what I gather. Also, ahead of the slicing knife on a veneer machine is a pressure bar, or nose bar, and some of those are heated as well to facilitate cutting. In a US Forest Products Laboratory publication from June 1959, the following comment is made about heating of different species:

Clicking on that image will enlarge it. Not sure if that is the most current thought on that topic, but I imagine it gives at least a rough outline of the idea.

Anyway, the heating effect is I think a minor factor - the main purpose of the hollowed configuration found on the underside of the dai is to improve the cutting by having the blade slice the material while it is elastically recoiling from the passing of the pressure bar. Now, there's more to it though - how that hollow is shaped is critical. In general, the rougher the cutting and the thicker the shavings, the more pronounced the curves have to be. What curves? Well, the curve of the hollow, i.e., the wave profile, and the curve of the blade, which also might be termed a smile. Hence the title of this post series in case it wasn't obvious at first. I'll talk more about the wave in the next post.

Thanks for dropping by the Carpentry Way. ➵ on to post III

Smile and Wave

2011-11-28T13:18:00.012-05:00

One of the curious things about the adoption, in recent years, of Japanese tools by woodworkers in Western countries is the selectivity of what has been adopted. At first the Japanese saw gained a foothold, and there were many converts. Strangely, there were any number of articles in woodworking magazines showing cross-cut saws employed to perform the rip cuts for dovetails, however people seem to be coming around in recent years to see that a rip saw is a better choice for such tasks. And there has been a certain amount of adoption of Japanese chisels, though skeptics remain it would appear. The orphan in the room has been the Japanese plane, kanna (鉋), which seems to have remained somewhat of a dark horse, or a black sheep, depending upon one's point of view, all this despite the utter centrality of the tool in traditional Japanese woodwork and carpentry. The reasons for this almost studious avoidance of the kanna among Westerners are perhaps difficult to discern. I suspect the fact that this is a tool which comes more or less as a kit without instructions is one factor. Neither 'kit' nor 'missing instructions' seem to be strong selling propositions. Perhaps because the tools appear archaic and crude is another - not nearly as sexy as the latest CNC'd aluminum Leigh jig or Bridge City offering.

The woodworker and writer David Charlesworth has written at length about Japanese chisels, water stones, and saws, yet when it comes to kanna he would appear to avoid them or at least avoid mentioning them. Why that is I can only speculate.

Here's a kanna - little more, it would appear, than a block of wood with a few bits of metal stuck in it:

There have been a few articles over the years in the various woodworking magazines attempting to explain/demystify the Japanese plane. Most of these seem to omit critical bits of information or are sometimes flat-out wrong in how they describe things, which can only add to the mystification of an apparently simple tool. This process seems to be going strong - a reader recently sent me a link to an article by Toshio Odate, a person who has done perhaps more than any other to help explain the spirit and use of traditional Japanese woodworking tools. This article (<-- link) appeared in 1993 in the magazine American Woodworker. I must confess to having virtually no familiarity with that magazine, as it seems to be aimed at the home-based hobby woodworker - noting wrong with that, but it is not my scene. And in 1993 I was living and working in Japan so I never came across it on a magazine stand.

Anyhow, the article is entitled Tuning Japanese Planes. I'm quite sure that Odate is skilled at doing just that. I'm also fairly sure he did not do the illustrations for the article, and it is in those illustrations that I found something curious, something which, if I may speculate, likely escaped Odate's attention. At least I hope so.

On page 65 of the magazine, we come to one of the most critical aspects to obtaining good performance from a Japanese plane - configuring the sole. I'll reproduce the page in it's entirety:

Trueing (sic)?! - whatever happened to spell check? Okay, okay, a minor nitpick. Odate, or whoever wrote the article, mentions that Japanese planes can be set up for truing work, much like a jointing plane in the west, or can also be set up for finish planing. He notes that the set-up for the plane soles is different between truing and finishing. Absolutely correct.

He then states that planes set up for truing have only two contact points, the front and the back, and that the cutting edge is set at the same height as those two points. Here's a close-up of the Figure 3 illustration provided in the article for the 'trueing' plane:

Does that look right to you dear reader? Well, it's NOT right. It's completely absurd actually. A plane set up in such a manner could not produce a flat surface, but a surface which was crowned over its length. And a plane set up like that would tend to produce a lot of tear out. PLEASE DISREGARD the above illustration! It is a shame to see that article, because it associates a craftsman like Odate to a completely incorrect set up of a plane. I really doubt that Odate would set up a plane in such a manner - something was miscommunicated to whomever was responsible for the illustration.

So, how should a plane sole be set up? Well, that's a secret I'm afraid, and you'll have to carry water up from the mine for at least 12 years before I can reveal such details. You know I gotta throw out stuff like that from time to time, to keep you from falling asleep. Actually, there are a lot of nuances to shaping the sole of the wooden plane and obtaining optimal performance, I can tell you right now that I have not reached anything like mastery with a kanna. Still, I know when I see something that's wrong and I have managed through various misadventures, wrong turns and blind alleys to pick up the odd bit of useful info along the way, and I'm happy to share that information here.

Let's start with basic anatomy, like a medical student. Here's my own crude attempt at drawing a kanna:

Click on the illustration for a larger view. The illustration is not exhaustive - I have held off labeling the surfaces of the plane blade for instance. The only key point I want to make in regards to the illustration is that of the terms for 'head' (daigashira, 台頭) and 'tail' (daijiri, 台尻) of the plane. The 'head' is the part of the plane furthest away from you when you are pulling it, the part of the dai, or plane block, which is trailing the cutter. The 'tail', or seat of the plane is the part closest to you when pulling the plane. This orientation of the tool in regards to the terms used might not be what many westerners would initially suspect. If you imagine the plane as a little person, and the wood is their playground slide, then the little person is going down the slide feet first, like most people would.

Next a cutaway view to allow for a few more descriptive terms to be tossed in:

While there are many specialized types of planes, molding planes, etc., in the realm of Japanese planes, when it comes to flattening down the surfaces of boards, which comprises the bulk of planing work, the planes are known as hira-ganna (平鉋). There are three general categories:

ara-shiko (荒仕工): ara, meaning 'rough' - for initial flattening. A scrub plane.

naka-shiko/chū-shiko (中仕工): an intermediate smoother. The kanji '中' can be read as either naka or chū

jō-shiko (仕上工): a finishing or fine smoothing plane. Also referred to as a shiage-ganna (仕上げ鉋), the word shiage pronounced 'shi-ah-geh'

In all three cases the character used at the end of the kanji compound is '工', literally a pictograph of a pair of beams with a post between them, a character which means 'construct'. The normal reading for that character is in fact kō, however in carpentry lingo the pronunciation has been shortened to a non-standard ko instead, a fact not reflected in either the JAANUS entries for the plane types, or the Wikipedia pages on the same topic (which I suspect were borrowed more or less directly from JAANUS). I've tried contacting JAANUS several times to alert them to the numerous errors in their database, however they don't respond to emails so I gave up on that effort.

Now, as far as shaping the sole of the kanna, an aspect which varies with the type of plane used and the desired performance, I'll save that for a 'part II'. Hope to see you then.　　→ on to part II

Not A Build Thread (II)

2011-11-18T19:42:00.003-05:00

A few more pictures so share of this quick build of a shelf unit to store some compact discs. Not really a build thread, more of a show and tell with minimal descriptions.

The curly Cherry was a delight to plane but not so easy to photograph:

Since this rack can be hung on a wall or placed upon the ground or a table, I decided to form small feet on the bottom of the case sides by relieving a portion, and then decided to add a little detail:

Roughed out:

You can't say that I am without heart.

All of the shelf components, except for the back, planed and ready for assembly:

A gave each piece a wipe with shellac, mostly for the shelf boards as Cherry can be uneven in how it accepts finishes:

The case got assembled by a crack team of elves, and here I am trimming the double-wedged shelf tenons flush to the carcase sides:

The saw I am using in the above picture, my jobber flush cutting saw, is very slightly dull, so it does not cut perfectly flush - I used a paring chisel to clean up the remains:

Next I planed the corner joints flush with the sides of the cabinet:

Setting the case to one side, I turned to working on the framed back panel parts. First I planed one side of the 5/16" thick Cherry panel:

The frame for the panel is made from some quartersawn Jatoba scraps, and is 3/8" thick. The frame is assembled with haunched mortise and tenon joints, the tenons being only 3/16" thick, 1" wide by 3/4" long. Assembly went without a hitch, and after slathering on some glue, I clamped the parts together for assembly. I let that sit for a few minutes, and I then took the panel out of the clamps and placed it in the cabinet, and then re-clamped. This ensures that the framed panel will fit without a hitch in the cabinet:

The upper frame member on the back has a 3/16" wide, 3/16" deep tongue which engages into a corresponding groove on the carcase top board. The framed panel it tipped in upper end first, then rotated down and into the rest of the rebate on the carcase.

A view from the front after assembly:

Another view:

So there you have it. I will fix the back panel to the case using four screws through the back panel's Jatoba frame into the back edges of two of the shelf boards. Then I will put 4 holes into the back panel frame so that I can use another four screws to fix the cabinet onto the wall. I don't use metal fasteners very often, but in this case, where the entire case it to be screwed onto the wall, it seemed appropriate.

All that remains to do it a round of oiling or two, a scrub off with some 3M abrasive cloth or #0000 steel wool, and then a coat or two of wax.

Thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way - comments always welcome.

WayStation: Follow Up

2011-11-15T18:08:00.001-05:00

In a post (<-- link) from a couple of years back, I described my quasi-apprenticeship with Watanabe Korehira, a swordsmith living in Hokkaidō, Japan. I recently came across a film clip of Watanabe-tosho, and thought I would share it with readers here. It gives you a good sense of the man and his dedication to his art:

Handmade Portraits: The Sword Maker from Etsy on Vimeo.

I'm glad to see that he seems to have found an apprentice, perhaps one of the 'one or two' on the entire island that Watanabe-tosho thought might possibly have what it takes to be an apprentice. I'm glad for him! It was moving for me to see him again in the film and hear his voice. I well remember my time there. Sometimes I wonder, just for a moment, how my life would be if I had decided to apprentice with Watanabe-san. Forks in the road....

Book Review: Get Your House Right

2011-11-13T14:59:00.011-05:00

In some recent reading, I came across a reference to a book by noted architectural designer Marianne Cusato, entitled Get Your House Right: Architectural Details to Use and Avoid. The description of the contents convinced me it was worth a read so I added it to my library. Having read through the work I feel it has some excellent points to make and, at the same time raises certain questions in my mind concerning some of the fundamental assumptions that underlie the work. I thought it would be worth taking the time to share some of my impressions here.

I think the Preface to the work is a really excellent piece of writing, and is a contribution by Leon Krier, himself a personal adviser on the topic of architecture and urban planning to a most famous modern critic of modern architecture, The Prince of Wales. Prince Charles in fact writes the Foreword to Get Your House Right, and his 'Carbuncle' speech (<-- link) from 1984 remains a classic.

Back to Krier though - I thought the Preface so astute a piece of writing that I would like to quote it in its entirety:

    "Americans visit Fallingwater in religious awe, but when they choose a home, they turn for inspiration to Williamsburg and Mount Vernon, to the vernacular and classical models. Despite sustained efforts to re-educate the public according to modernist ideals, traditional designs have never ceased to dominate residential architecture in the United States. And yet even though "houses of the future" no longer look futuristic, the modernist propaganda has done lasting damage. The scandalous truth is that the vast majority of architecture schools today simply do not teach the theory and practice of traditional house design. worse, they have erased the subject from their technical, intellectual, and artistic horizon.
    The battle cry "Bauhaus instead of our house" has rallied the profession. It blinds it to environmental problems, to the reality of the housebuilding industry, and, paradoxically, to the taste and wishes of most house buyers. It is as if architects were trained to serve an alien people on a distant planet. They themselves go on living, working, and vacationing in traditional environs, but don't see the irony when it is put to them. Instead, a student or teacher who shows more than a passing interest in traditional concepts will be isolated from the academic cocoon like a blasphemer in theology class.
    Imagine the fate of plain English if American schools ceased to teach the common language and began to ostracize its speakers. This is exactly what traditional architectural disciplines have been subjected to for more than two score years. The institutional attrition helps to explain the fact that the last half-century has, despite its unparalleled material wealth, produced the most debased traditional building styles in recorded history. The ill-sized, the ill-fitted, the ill-designed and ill-constructed, have become the norm in a field that represents a large part of the gross national product and absorbs much of family savings. The triumph of kitsch sensibility - the culture of the mean, the synthetic, and the fake - may be seen as the unintended results, the distorted mirror image of modernism.
    Ironically, the most serious threat to traditional culture today comes no longer from modernism itself, but from "traditional" simulacra. Architectural analphabetism produces stunning, sometimes comical results. Discussing this book in a prestigious Washington, D.C., hotel, the authors overlooked the new pool house with its twelve sparkling Tuscan columns erected upside down, standing on their capitals. This scandal didn't raise an eyebrow among the fine clientele, nor did it cause headlines. such and more serious mistakes in construction and design are now so common that they have become the signature of our time, as style with specific characteristics.
    Curiously, the mistakes are "cultivated" with conviction; they are frequent and repetitive, they are stubbornly and sometimes proudly committed by all building trades, by professionals and amateurs. They are built by house builders and bought into by house buyers. They have spread ineradicably across five continents and through almost all cultures. How can such confusion triumph so completely without causing organized reactions or public protest? And why don't the buildings themselves collapse under the weight of their misconception?
    Traditional and classical architecture can be thought of as a language - a grammar of constructing buildings from natural materials such as wood, stone, earth, sand, lime. Mistakes in joining, laying, or framing these materials become quickly evident through uncontrollable behavior, settling, cracking, or collapsing; even a genius cannot build a lasting mistake out of nature's materials. But synthetic materials (concrete, steel, wood derivatives, plastics) and their specific joining techniques (casting, gluing, bolting, soldering, nailing) allow anyone to realize foolish forms without facing immediate ruin. When these materials and techniques are used to ape traditional designs, technology and semantics go inevitably on a collision course, ending in grinding - and lasting - incongruities.
    To iron out the resulting anachronisms is taxing to an individual's capacities. The authors of this book have all tried and failed too often. It is sheer despair that has brought them together to draft ways out of the maze. The problems illustrated here are at once of a formal and technical nature; they are not, as ideologists claim, of a philosophical kind. Nor are they so complex as to be beyond the grasp of practical intelligence. To build a fine traditional house isn't that much more of an effort than to make a mess of it. It requires, more than anything, aesthetic sense, knowledge, judgment, and a passion for joining materials into meaningful forms that bring true and daily enjoyment to those who look at them, use them, and live in them.
   In this book we do not belabor the reasons for what is nothing less than a cultural catastrophe, nor do we want to make converts for what can seem like yet another cause. Instead, we offer a primer to help those people who are already passionately convinced of the good sense of traditional building. The latter is neither a religion nor a mystery. It is about technique and means of solving building problems with elegance and intelligence. Its solutions are self-evident and rational, practical and lasting, and when guided by talent, they are blessed with grace."

That was very well put and I am in agreement with much of it, particularly the criticisms of the modernist movement and it's failures, and the apocalyptic landscape of McMansions and soul-sucking poorly built ugly faux crap that characterizes the vast portion of the built landscape, particularly here in North America. Did I state that too strongly?

What I find slightly ironic is that architectural designers and such - in which I mean the authors of Get Your House Right - are arguing for a reset back to an age when there were no architects, at least for residential construction. They are making a case, in a certain sense, for a return to the Master Builder paradigm, in which pattern and not fad ruled the day. Sadly though, as I detailed in a series from a few years back, the Master Builder tradition is in the graveyard, likely to stay until the bubble in which we live, the one produced by the industrial revolution and which has surged for 150 years on the back of cheap energy, has popped. So, really, at best all the authors can argue for here is for builders and architects to select better quality industrially-produced building products and components, and put them together in a way which honors the constructional logic that led to the creation of the forms in the first place.

No one would be fooled if they saw a car produced with the wheels placed sideways, the headlamps facing the driver, or the steering wheel on one side and the pedals on the other, however with vernacular architecture, for some strange reason, people do not notice incongruities of a similar scope. I laughed in reading the description of the upside down Tuscan columns in the upscale D.C. hotel mentioned in the Preface. It is absolutely unsurprising and absolutely humorous at the same time. How is it that a builder/architect/installer wouldn't understand what column entasis (<-- link) is all about? Curiously, the word 'entasis' is sufficiently unusual that the blogger spell-checker is red-lining it - that should tell me something.

So, most of Get Your House Right: Architectural Details to Use and Avoid deals with architecture in a section-by-section basis: doors, windows, facades, massing, roofs, etc., in a similar manner to many 19th century pattern books - with the added benefit of showing the reader, often in a side-by-side format, what NOT to do. In most cases it is readily apparent why the things to be avoided are inferior to those things they say we should use. Those who build or design vernacular N. American architecture really should have this book on their shelves. I would be most gratified if even 10% of the guide points suggested in the work were taken up on a wider scale. I'm not going to spend time in this review going over any of that material however. The authors make their case quite convincingly and it is undoubtedly true that the built environment would look a lot better if more of these types of buildings followed the classic patterns with greater fidelity.

What I found particularly edifying were the illustrations showing the origins of the classical orders and what the various parts related to. Stone architecture was generally in imitation of wooden antecedents, and it is interesting to learn which stone parts correspond to which wooden ones:

Columns topped by a beam, then floor joists, a rafter plate and then the rafters. Nice and straightforward, direct, and rational.

In wood at least.

When the same elements above are rendered in stone however, a certain degree of abstraction occurs - compare the following illustration, labeling the same parts as the above picture:

The scale of the parts has altered. Note how slim the architrave is in the stone structure - in wood, such a depth of beam would be inadequate, especially in proportion to the parts above. And who would have guessed that the ogee-shaped Cyma is actually representing a gutter? Or that the Bedmold is in reality a rafter plate?

It is no great surprise that the stone structure, though it imitates a wooden one, has different proportions of parts. It has to. After all, different materials have different qualities and respective advantages/disadvantages. Stone, for instance, is great for columns but not so strong when used as beams. While the earliest stone buildings would likely have been fairly close in imitation of the 'traditional' wooden forms which preceded them, over time, designs done in stone and upon stone's qualities would have moved/evolved further and further away from the starting place.

So the ancient Greeks and Romans massaged and adjusted the proportions of these parts over many many years and produced the stone temples and public buildings which have formed the underpinnings of the Western architectural tradition.

And then a funny thing happened in the 1830's, when the so-called 'Greek Revival', an architectural fad which was not particularly Greek, nor was it a revival (in the case of houses at least - what was being 'revived' were the forms of temples, which were to be applied to banks, government buildings, and houses). Perhaps, though, in this culture, the temple = bank link is not so hard to make :^).

A curious inversion took place with the advent of this fad - in the case of houses, wooden forms were now to be configured so as to imitate stone forms which in turn were themselves imitating wooden forms. A copy of a copy, and in that copying, an important message was lost.

And thus I find it a little whacky that the authors of this book, while taking the trouble to make clear how the forms of the orders derived from wooden architecture, then advocate we continue on with an imitation in wood of patterns which were established by copying wooden forms in stone and then abstracting these forms over hundred of years. And yet they also talk about truth to materials in this book, arguing against vinyl siding in place of wood, against fake, wire-cut, or machine make brick in place of real brick. So, I find this aspect curious, however maybe they are simply being pragmatic. If people are going to build this way, then let's show them the 'right' way. Hmm.

One of the issues I have with such prescriptions of what is 'right' and 'wrong' however is the simple fact that there is an overlay of logic onto something which didn't entirely make sense from the get-go. This is exactly the same as those who tried to overlay rules of Latin grammar onto English - it doesn't quite fit. Ditto for the borrowing of Chinese characters into Japanese. In such cases it would appear inevitable that things will become somewhat convoluted when you try to assemble such disparate parts, and no matter what, it's never quite convincing. I teach SAT test prep as a part time gig, and some of the rules of grammar in English, which were largely invented in the 19th century, don't really make a lot of sense, and are still in fact subject to intense debate by those interested in such topics. I'm not one of those people, I'm just stuck with the task of trying to explain obscure rules of grammar that virtually no one uses to hapless high school students.

Anyway, why are we imitating Grecian/Roman temples in our houses? It's absurd. It would be as odd if the we started building housing subdivisions composed of structures which imitated wooden bridges, or Gothic Churches. Houses, barns, and temples have their architecture configured in specific way as a result of how the building is used. And as much as I have my reservations about Frank Lloyd Wright, he was astute in his observations about our houses composed of interminable little boxes -well, perhaps I should quote him directly, from The Natural House (1954):

"What was the matter with the typical American house? Well, just for an honest beginning, it lied about everything. It had no sense of unity at all nor any such sense of space as should belong to a free people. It was stuck up in thoughtless fashion. It had no more sense of earth than a "modernistic" house. And it was stuck upon wherever it happened to be. To take any one of these so-called "homes" away would have helped to clear the atmosphere. The thing was more a hive than a home just as "modernistic" houses are more boxes than houses. But these "homes" were very like the homes Americans were making for themselves elsewhere, all over their new country.
Nor, where the human being was concerned, had this typical dwelling any appropriate sense of proportion whatever. It began somewhere down in the wet and ended up as high as it could get in the high and narrow. All materials looked alike to it or to anything or anybody in it. Essentially, whether of brick or wood or stone, this "house" was a bedeviled box with a fussy lid; a complex box that had to be cut up by all kinds of holes made in it to let in light and air, with an especially ugly hole to go it and come out of. The holes were "trimmed"; the doors and windows themselves trimmed; the roofs trimmed; the walls trimmed. Architecture seemed to consist in what was done to these holes."

Like FLW, I have to wonder why North Americans must continue patterning their boxes after pseudo Greek temples, and why we don't develop an architecture for ourselves, based on this natural environment and the materials it is blessed with. Do we have no originality? Why if Americans are so proud to have escaped the yoke of colonial British rule more than 200 years back, in to 'freedom' and all that good stuff, are people still clamoring to have colonial style houses? It's kind of weird if you ask me.

And another point - what is with this urge to emulate ancient Greek or Roman architectural patterns, when the average person in North America knows next to nothing, or perhaps I should say NOTHING, about those cultures otherwise? I find the whole thing rather bizarre. But then again, if I might make an aside, this is a culture where people were seriously talking at one point about renaming French fries as 'Freedom Fries'; I'm thinking that these same people are probably wearing 'All American' blue jeans without realizing that 'denim' originates in France (named after a place called Nîmes, that is a product 'de Nîmes', and that the word 'jeans' is also French, from the French word for Genoa Italy, Gênes, where the first denim trouser were made). Yes, I digress.

It's not as if Western civilization couldn't construct beautiful buildings without paying heed to the classical architectural orders - take a look at this German half-timbered house, and you'll see that things can look quite alright without Cyma moldings and entablature, etc. (photo by D. McAnany):

I could similarly dig up examples from England, like this little cob cottage:

Similar examples could be shown from any number of other countries. Beautiful houses can be built of natural materials, in a manner that honors the qualities of those materials, without any recourse to hair-pulling about whether the moldings are built up in the right patterns, whether the windows should have muntins or not etc. Even if one does make use of classic architectural details, they can be combined sensitively without slavish obedience to the classical orders, like this example, the Broadgreen Historic House (1850) in Nelson, New Zealand (picture by PDL Photography):

That house is also made of cob. Not a material mentioned in Cusato's book, and I'm sure the combination of elements seen in the above photos is a mish-mash of styles in terms of the classic orders, but I find it pleasing all the same. Personally though, I would avoid placing valleys in the roof like that.

I guess, in the end, this book Get Your House Right: Architectural Details to Use and Avoid teaches you how to think inside the box, carefully and with fidelity to the logic of classical patterns. It still assumes a house built of factory-produced standardized components, trucked to the site and assembled. The architect's job is now to pick wisely from a component catalog. That's as far as an argument for craftsmanship seems to go in this work. Cusato's argument that a key aspect of what makes for sustainable architecture is that the buildings be sufficiently attractive that we want to keep them instead of calling in the demolition company is an excellent point with which I wholeheartedly agree. If one builds or renovates wooden structures that are in imitation of the classical orders in their decoration and fenestration, then it is vital to understand that those orders had a logic and a beauty absolutely worthy of study, since the finished result is much more seamless and, well, orderly. Understanding the whys is a key to sorting through the hows and the whats of any developed form of architecture. I just don't get the part about why we should continue to emulate ancient temples as a pattern for housing.

Not A Build Thread

2011-11-12T11:01:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd post a few pictures - and it really is a few - of the progress of the CD rack I am throwing together. Not really a build thread, just the odd picture or three.

After I had cut the joints, I did a partial trial assembly to make sure everything was lining up and to see how the Black Cherry and Lacewood were looking together:

At this point, the shelf boards are a hair oversize and do not insert into the housings cut on the inside of the Lacewood stiles, so the joints are about 1/8" (3mm) from closing up:

Everything seems to be connecting as it should:

From past experience I have learned that Lacewood is not a wood that can successfully be put together with PVA glue (it will fail to adhere to the Lacewood), so I will use epoxy for the case's dovetail connections. Since there are no good glue surfaces in the connection between the shelves and the stiles, except the sidewalls of the tenons, I'm planning to only apply glue to the wedges and their kerfs. It will make for a stress-free glue up, of which I'm all in favor! The joints fit tightly, so that is the key, the glue only acts as an insurance/back up.

The next step in this project is to plane all the boards to finish, cut the wedges for the through mortise and tenon joints, and work on putting the back panel together.

The back of this piece is of frame and panel construction, with a Jatoba frame and a Cherry panel. The whole affair is quite slim, with the frame only 3/8" (9.52mm) thick and the panel about 5/16" (8mm). The frame members of the back will join with very skinny haunched mortise and tenons. The case is designed so that it may stand on the floor, or upon a desk, or be mounted on a wall. The initial installation will be hung on a wall, so I'm intending to hang the case from its back panel. The contents are fairly light in weight so I think it should all work out to hang everything off the back even though it is a slender assembly. The back panel will be made so as to be removable, and I'm still deciding how I will connect it to the rest of the unit. I might use screws, as after all, this is a 'quick and dirty' project making use of some scraps. We'll see....

Thanks for visiting!

Code Alert

2011-11-08T17:44:00.001-05:00

Been a little lax on the posting of late. No major projects to write about, however I have been a bit preoccupied with familiarizing myself with the International Building Code (IBC), the International Residential Code (IRC), the Architectural Access Code, the current Osha Regulations, and the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). That's right, I'm preparing to take my unrestricted contractor's license in Massachusetts. While the neighboring states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and New York lack statewide licensing requirements for home building contractors (along with 19 other US states), Massachusetts requires that a contractor be licensed if they are to take on a significant housing repair or construction project.

So, I'm taking a 7-session class to prepare for the exam, and we meet once a week for 3.5 action packed hours of thrills and spills, looking stuff up in the code books. Our instructor likes to say, 'answer is A - Apple', and 'C, for Cat', stuff like that. Actually, I'm learning a lot of good stuff - who couldn't, when faced with a pile of light reading like this?:

We get a fair amount of homework after each class, so I spend a good chunk of my remaining week looking up obscure regulations concerning such things as nailing schedules, widths of egress, heights of fire alarm pulls, masonry fireplace design details, approved ceiling finishes for class I and II buildings, etc etc. I also had to obtain notarized letters of attestation from past employers so as to prove at least 3 years employment as a carpenter, and will have to pony up another bit of cash to take the exam at the end of the course. The exam is open book, multiple choice, and administered by computer. You have 3 hours to answer 75 questions, which is actually pretty tough sledding. 'Pass' is achieved by getting 70% correct or better. I'm feeling at this point that I have a good chance of passing based on my homework gradings so far. We'll see. It's going to cost me about $800 when all is said and done.

I will admit that I do have mixed feelings about the building code, a hefty binder which grows fatter with each issuance (about every three years a new edition comes out). First off, it is a little funny to me that it is called an 'International' code when the dimensions, weights, and other measures are given in the inch/feet/pounds scales (often, though not always, with metric measures alongside in parentheses). A lot of the rules, especially concerning fire safety, accessibility, materials testing and so forth make good sense. I guess where I find it less enthralling are where they get prescriptive, telling you HOW to do something and with what materials, rather than giving a performance objective to meet.

You know, the Great Pyramid at Giza likely wouldn't meet building code regulations - note sure if the means of egress has clear markings and appropriately configured 'EXIT' signs, and what about the lack of handrails? My god, what a disaster that was. They should tear is down and replace it something more conforming. I can think of a lot of indigenous building ways which would not conform to these code books either, and I fear the growth of such books and the tendency among most bureaucratic systems to gravitate towards self-enlargement and ever-increasing realms of control will ultimately tend towards a narrowing sterility in terms of what we build. It's already happening and has been happening for 100 years or so already. There's the point that the code is about minimum standards, which are not generally what you want to be following if you want to create a well-made structure. There's also the case to be made about buildings codes being configured to suit industry above and beyond other concerns, whether it be the insurance industry or those companies making building products, but I'll take that up some other time perhaps.

Philosophical objections aside, the pragmatic argument is that in order to get work here in Massachusetts, a lot of potential clients are going to be filtering their choices through the licensed/unlicensed divider. If you want to list your services on Craigslist, for example, you need to state whether you are licensed or not, and that - being unlicensed as I am at present -is going to cause some folks to not even consider my services. Insurance companies and banks issuing construction loans also stipulate that the contractors be licensed, so in order to increase my chances of obtaining work, I need to hop over that fence and stand on the other side. And I think it certainly doesn't hurt to become familiar with the regulations which govern construction, as this definitely can help avoid costly mistakes where you have to rip out something you just built because, say, the balusters on the handrail are too widely spaced, or some such thing.

In other news, I'm building a little CD storage rack for the household. It's not much different constructionally than the bookcase I made a few months back, so I'm not going to bother with a build thread. I'm making it out of leftovers and scraps - and despite a certain temptation to screw and glue something together all quick like, I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to do. The case sides are Australian Lacewood, the top casing and shelves are Black Cherry, the back panel is Black Cherry and the back panel frame is Jatoba.

I thought I'd share few pictures of where things stand at this juncture. Here are the joins for the carcase upper corners (right 3 boards) and the shelves (left 4 boards):

The shelves are multiple-tenoned, housed, and will also be wedged. Here I'm sawing the kerfs for the wedges on one shelf board end:

First one side, and then the other:

It took about 40 minutes to kerf all the tenons:

I'll post up a few more pics along the way and share them with you. Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way.

Book Review: Japanese Cabinetmaking (II)

2011-10-27T12:33:00.003-04:00

In last week's post I described some of the background to Carol A.B. Link's work from 1975, a doctoral thesis entitled Japanese Cabinetmaking: a Dynamic System of Decisions and Interactions in a Technical Context. In this post I'd like to take a look the material which comprised the next portion of the text. This is a distillation of Link's experience living in the home of the Tsuzuki family, where a father and son carried on the family tradition of high class cabinetmaking.

'Cabinetmaking', as an English word, while it used to refer mostly to the work performed at the bench by joiners, now is applied it would seem to just about any woodworking activity in which storage boxes are made. If you asked most English speakers what a 'joiner' was, I'd wager 90% would not know, and of those who ventured a guess most would think it has something to do with someone who likes to join clubs or groups. Or think it had something to do with a certain tool for slotting wood for the insertion of fiberboard/compressed wood 'biscuits'...

'Cabinetmaking' has, in these modern times, become almost as meaningless an expression as 'high quality' or 'craftsmanship' - just another piece of advertising hyperbole. Speaking of which, the latest word which seems to have lost all meaning must be 'artisan', now plastered on some 800 different industrially-produced products according to a data research group called Datamonitor. Someone's even started blogging about it. And further speaking of which, USA Today recently had an article on that very topic.

'Cabinetmaking', in the context of Link's work, is at best a rather loose translation of a certain class of woodwork done in Japan and may be entirely misleading unless the term is more closely defined. Link explains some of the nuances:

"In Japan joiners are placed in separate categories depending upon their specialty. The tansuya-san specializes in producing large tansu. The smaller and more varied products are made by a different specialist, the sashimono-shi. Although both tansuya-san and sashimono-shi are joiners, the sashimono-shi is regarded with deference by connoisseurs in general and the tansuya-san in particular. This is because sashimono-shi exercise their skills over an enormous range of products, have a very high degree of versatility and display great mastery of their craft. Sashimono-shi are now rare in Japan. One of the best, Mr. Yasuku Tsuzuki, lives in Kusakabe. He is a bijutsu-sashimono-shi. Bijutsu means "fine arts". The whole term can be translated as a joiner, whose level of skill is so perfected, that the cabinets produced are considered to be works of fine art just like paintings or sculpture. At the present time, there are only four or five bijutsu-sashimono-shi in the whole Kanto plain and they are all older men ranging in age from 68 to 96."

Link was fortunate to have an opportunity to spend a full year living with and observing the behavior and work patterns of a master craftsman, as they are rather thin on the ground, even more so today.

Link spends some time describing the Tsuzuki family structure and their members, along with their family tree. Yusuku, the master, began his apprenticeship at age 12, finishing that phase at age 21. She mentions that of his sons only Yukio, now 48, is carrying on the family's woodworking tradition. Yukio's daughter commutes to a job in Tōkyō for the Sumitomo company, son Tomoyuki is 19 and a college student specializing in electronics. Younger son Hideyuki is 13 and seems mostly interested in baseball.

The Tsuzuki shop is small and appended to the house, and shop business is the family's bread and butter supply - I mean rice and beans I guess! I felt some kinship with the Tsuzuki family, when Link notes that although they have plenty of orders and are always busy,

"Unfortunately they do not really receive adequate compensation for their labors although their prices for their products seem very high to a purchaser. The simple fact of the matter is that ojiisan [Yususku] and Yukio work almost continuously in order to support themselves and their family. It is a sad situation but in present day Japan, there is no immediate solution for it."

All too familiar. When you hear that familiar refrain of, 'do what you love and the money will follow' - take it with a grain of salt. Sometimes money doesn't follow, or even appear with any regularity, but at least one can, hopefully, derive some satisfaction from the work itself. As Link notes later,

"Other major benefits are work satisfaction and ultimate justification for one's own life. As ojiisan and Yukio say, "you have a really good feeling (kimochi ga yoi) when you can and do make things yourself", and "there is nothing like the satisfaction you get when everything fits perfectly and is beautiful."

As Link subsequently remarks, and this has been amplified by many other writers, and in pretty much any account of the traditional crafts in Japan you might read in the past 30 years,

"Evidently the Japanese youth do not seem to appreciate these sorts of benefits and, since the post war period, ojiisan has not had any live-in apprentices save for his son. They ultimately abandoned the hope of having new apprentices and razed half of their building seven years ago."

I'm not sure if it is entirely the case across Japan that such glamorous work as that of shashimono-shi suffers from a lack of apprentices, but certainly many of the other trades, especially what might be called the ancillary trades (makers of tools, sawyers, etc.) are experiencing a decline in numbers, a trend that has continued since the post war period. I dare say the same thing is occurring in the West - few young people choose a career in the trades, it is more likely that getting into a trade is as much a default or happenstance occurrence for those who couldn't get into college (or didn't want to go to college for whatever reason) and can afford to take out student loans to obtain a trade ticket. And given the nature of many trades jobs here, who can blame them? The work is generally dull, repetitive, occasionally hazardous, not esteemed by the society as a whole, and not tending to encourage artistry or virtuosity.

An interesting section of Link's work relates to the concept of the shoku-nin (職人), a term generally translated variously as workman, mechanic, or craftsman. Yusuku and his son Yukio see themselves as part of a select group of craftspeople, an 'in-group' which comprises only those who are joiners, lacquerers, fan makers and so forth. In their eyes, carpenters, mechanics and other tradespeople are not true shoku-nin. I find that interesting, and it reminds me of similar attitudes in certain trades in the West - those who would call themselves, say, a shipwright, or 'stair-builder' might have a very specific idea of what that work comprises and who qualifies. Like many who have spent years acquiring manual skills and a deep knowledge of their craft, the Tsuzukis are proud of what they do:

"By the Tsuzukis' standards, drawers must be perfectly flush with each other, must slide easily with no strain and they must not, under any circumstances, rattle. A rattling, loose drawer is anathema to ojiisan and Yukio. The first drawers were slipped into the chest with some trepidation, but their ultimate perfect fit brought an absolutely beatific smile of satisfaction to ojiisan's face.
    Those unacquainted with this work do not really appreciate this feature of drawers. The average person presumes only that a drawer should slide and the degree of perfection of sliding elicits a 'so what' reaction. Connoisseurs, cabinetmakers, their shokunin colleagues and dealers seek out this feature and have a regard for the care and dexterity that goes into perfect drawers that surpasses mere admiration. It is a sensitive awareness and esteem for the skill of the maker and the devotion that he has shown to his work to produce a superb product. This is based on the knowledge that one cut of the plane too many will ruin the job beyond repair."

That 'so what' reaction when demonstrating a nuance of a piece to a client or friend is, I'm sure, familiar to any artisan or detail freak. I think one of the weakest aspects, in terms of the business of being an artisan in this modern world, is clearly communicating the subtleties of the craft to the buying public. Most of us suck at that aspect of our work frankly. Take a look at the car or stereo industry, where they have managed somehow to make many of their customers acutely aware of the various technical and performance details which separate one brand from another. You'll hear people, product salespeople included, spouting such phrases as 'twin piston, vented rotors', 'multi-point injection', 'Corinthian leather', or '5 watt RMS power' without having the slightest idea in many cases what those terms really mean. If it sounds cool and is described in breathless excitement, or with the aid of T & A, then it generally seems to sell.

The Tsuzukis have a bit of an easier time with their marketing, partly on account of a buying public in Japan some ways more attuned to the virtues of handmade wooden products, and partly due to the way their products are distributed:

"One other way that the Tsuzukis receive a great deal of satisfaction and pride from their work is grounded in their marketing system. Their products are sold at two shops in Kusakabe, Saikiri and the Taikei Furniture shop, which carry only top quality merchandise. The other main retail outlet is the Mitsukoshi Department Store (a few other major department stores also sell their products sporadically). Mitsukoshi celebrated its 300th anniversary in 1973. Throughout these 300 years, Mitsukoshi has developed and maintained a reputation for carrying only the best products, especially folk art and craft items. In addition to commissioning works from the finest craftsmen, the people at Mitsukoshi usually inspect the merchandise they receive before accepting it. Ojiisan and Yukio are deservedly proud that their products are not inspected. They are assumed to be flawless and are taken from the loading dock to the sales floor without further ado.
     These features of self-evaluation by constant comparison of current efforts with past; critical appraisal of the work of others; unquestioning acceptance of products by all dealers serve to reinforce ojiisan's and Yukio's standards of workmanship. They also provide justification for their pride in status as shokinin."

I actually find it hard to imagine such a store here in the US, where Walmart rules the strip. Now, there are galleries dotted about here and there which showcase high end furniture, among other things, but in my experience and estimation those doing the selling often have little knowledge of the details and nuances which make for great furniture, and are left, like many salespeople, mouthing inaccuracies and generalities about the pieces. Fine furniture has always seemed to be considered on the fringe of the 'fine arts' in the West, for whatever reason, and thus it is more poorly understood, and less avidly promoted. Galleries selling antiques are sometimes an exception to this phenomenon. And maybe those generalities are enough sometimes, at least in terms of selling the odd piece, given that most of what a customer reacts to - by conditioning - are the surface and form qualities of a thing, but it is a definite shortcoming. The Tsuzukis are lucky to have the infrastructure, culturally and otherwise, in place which supports what they do to some extent. I gather though, that this is changing for the worse in Japan in recent years.

Interestingly, bound up in the Tsuzuki's self-identification as shokinin is a sense of superiority:

"They have a slightly disdainful attitude towards carpenters and the like, whom they consider to be engaged in relatively unskilled labor.
   Moreover they are rather contemptuous of salary men ['suits']. They feel the salary man is tightly bound to a corporate structure where he has no ability to enjoy any personal freedom and, more unfortunately, can obtain no gratification from his labors."

While their contempt and disdain for others is unfortunate in some ways, I wonder what they would think of the typical carpenter here, with, if I might paint a picture, his Ford F150, tool racks, boom box, travel mug, chop saw, Fat Max and nailer? I think I'll refrain from speculation.

I thought that Link's mention of the career path of the Tusuzuki's being more than just a day job, but a Way of life, a michi:

"Michi is a simple Japanese word for a very complex concept. This term has many translations, the most mundane of which is a road. It also means journey, a way of making a living, a means, a duty, a moral doctrine, and art, a specialty, a course, etc. In compound terms the range of meaning is even wider. The negative form michinaranu means illicit, immoral, improper, in other words directionless and without a goal.
    On a broad level michi means the path that a person takes through life. Each person has their own michi. some choose their own. Ojiisan had his chosen for him. The life and work of a sashimono-shi has become his michi. He not only works as a sashimono-shi, but he IS a sashimono-shi. He has gained knowledge of himself and harmony with the world in the same way a Zen monk gains knowledge and enlightenment by the Zen michi. He is a happy man. His son, Yukio, who had the sashimono-shi michi chosen for him by ojiisan, is also content in his michi. To understand this is to understand their way of life and work."

And that description of the Way, my friends, is the reason behind the name of this blog.

Link concludes the section with a quote from Carlos Casteneda's work A Separate Reality, a work I have fond memories of reading in my twenties:

"You should know by now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think about when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it; and then he looks and rejoices and laughs..."

If he's not starving to death that is. It's hard not to feel inspired though by those who have such clarity about their direction in life. I spent many years not knowing what my own direction was and certainly don't look back at those times with delight. I feel empathy for those who struggle to find purpose in their work, to find their 'calling', and can tell you that when one finds the right path for oneself, it is truly a blessing.

I guess I'll have more to say in the next part of this review. Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way.

Book Review: Japanese Cabinetmaking

2011-10-17T13:20:00.002-04:00

A few years ago a reader brought to my attention a clipping from an old Fine Woodworking magazine (Issue #57, March/April 1986, p. 106), featuring a review of a book on Japanese Cabinetmaking by John Willey in Maine. The author of the book in question is Carol A.B. Link, and the full title of her work is: Japanese Cabinetmaking: a Dynamic System of Decisions and Interactions in a Technical Context. Don't let the title put you off - it's an interesting and highly readable work. And a very hard bit of paperwork to obtain. You see, this 'book' is actually Link's PhD dissertation in cultural anthropology, undertaken at the University of Illinois in 1975. While the material is available on microfilm at the university, and I'm sure there is at least one bound copy in the stacks, in general, paper versions are somewhat hard to come by. I managed to make contact with Link's academic adviser, Dr. Keller, who remembered Link and her thesis and said he would help out if my inquiries in other directions did not prove fruitful. In the end, I got nowhere with my attempts to pry a copy of the dissertation out of the University, and contacted Dr. Keller again. Then a stroke of good luck - his wife was clearing off some bookshelves and came across a single copy of the dissertation, which he then sent to me for free! So, that was lucky.

Link studied cultural anthropology and the method she employed in tackling the subject matter was to go to Japan and live/work in a cabinetmaker's household (that of the Tsuzuki family), and write about her experience. That is to say, she chose to write about a lived experience rather than simply collate information from other written sources, a problem which, in my view, plagues many scholarly analyses of material culture and technology. If you don't use tools yourself, then the difference between an axe and an adze maybe obscured or considered irrelevant, however to a craftsperson who uses such tools, the differences are obvious and important.

Link spends the first two chapters of her work discussing the history of anthropological examinations of material culture and technology and finds them coming up short for the most part:

"Most people admit that technology is vital to man's survival. Some say that technology has made man what he it. It is currently fashionable to berate technology as the despoiler of all that is good, true and beautiful in human life. These admissions, concerns and criticisms indicate the importance of technology to man.

Despite this importance, one wonders why anthropologists are notable for a lack of interest in or cursory treatment of the subject."

I have found that to be true, and many academic treatises involving crafts and trades and their products make humorous errors at times in their descriptions of tools and their uses. Refer back to my review of Asian Furniture for but one example out of many.

Chapters 3 and 4 of Link's work take up the thorny issues of coming to satisfactory definition of what 'material culture' and technology' mean, and the establishment of a philosophical foundation for the study of technology as a system of behavior. Chapter 5 delves into the performance of technical behavior, a 'dynamic system of decisions and interactions':

"Technology, as a system of behavior, has features which allow it to be analyzed and understood almost as if it were communication. It is not precisely analogous to communication since it is an asymmetrical system. The difference hinges on who is communicating with whom or what. In everyday life people communicate with each other via language to convey information but in technical behavior, an actor communicates with materials via the body and implements (if any are used) in order to produce something. The actor does not receive a message encoded in language but he does receive feedback information (such as temperature) from the materials that he responds to in the same way one responds to sentences in a conversation.

This is a dynamic process in that, at every moment in time, every feature of this system has been changed by, and is changing, every other feature in the system. In this way, technique is the knowledge that informs the activity of workmanship and vice-versa."

Link's discussion of workmanship is particularly interesting, given the ground-breaking done on this topic by David Pye, in his seminal 1968 work The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Link quotes Pye quite often, though not always in agreement with him. These are questions I continually mull over myself, puzzling the connections between culture and the material objects it produces, and the approach to workmanship bound up in the choices made. Why, for instance, is North American culture so preoccupied with producing mountains of crap, and almost nothing of lasting value for future generations to appreciate? Don't we care about our kids, and their kids? Why, despite the fabulous quantities and qualities of materials and products available here, is the quality of work done upon them often so abysmal, and how is it that cheap prices have come to trump almost every other concern in consumer's minds? Those questions are for another post, another time, but it is good that Link spends some effort in addressing ideas about workmanship and crafting of objects early on in her thesis. Her conclusion in regards to technique and knowledge in the crafting of material object is much as follows:

"...one can see that knowledge of techniques is much more than what can simply be written down. In view of this, it is time to radically alter our ideas about the nature of techniques. Pye came close to the mark when he stated that, "Technique is the knowledge which informs the activity of workmanship."(1968:22) and, as amended (p.28), the activity of workmanship informs the knowledge too. When approached this way, technique is not simply how-to or even the knowledge of how-to. It becomes a communications system wherein knowledge of techniques is expressed in physical activity and the results of the activity along with the activity itself inform the actor of what he is doing, how well he is doing it, and, most important of all, when to stop doing it. Thus, the exercise of a technique stimulates, indeed forces, the actor to decide what his next act will be. The next act, of course, is based on knowledge of techniques and so this becomes a continuous, dynamic process of technical behavior." (p.46)

Hence the sub-title of the work, Japanese Cabinetmaking: a Dynamic System of Decisions and Interactions in a Technical Context. While much of what she mentions above is fairly obvious to a craftsperson, though perhaps rarely stated so clearly, I think for those outside the work of those who make objects with their hands this is helpful clarification. Knowing where to stop - where the line of 'perfection' (or, as is more commonly expressed, 'good enough' - I term I personally detest) is and where it is crossed, often thereby producing a negative outcome in certain respects. That goes for both design and making of course. It's not simply a paint-by-numbers affair as some might assume who have not been engaged in a crafting process. Particularly with solid woodworking, where the medium can be almost capricious at times in moving with every saw cut or cracking, or splitting in unpredictable ways, or absorbing finished unevenly, or defying attempts to employ glue, etc. Like I've said before, this is a process akin to corralling sheep, where the best outcome is to get them all into the pen - you can pretty much forget about having them stand in precise rows. You have to shift on the fly and make continual course corrections and adjustments, being aware of your material and the end result and problem solving to an extent as you follow your plan. Baking bread can be like that too. Blacksmithing and many other crafts are likewise - an iterative process.

Later on in the fifth chapter, Link delves into the issue of standards of workmanship, taking cues again from Pye's work, where he mentions that what a craftsman wants to do is, "not to express the properties of materials [which are objective and measurable], but to express their qualities [which are subjective]." While I don't totally agree with this contention myself, it is a good starting point for discussion. Link notes,

"Standards of workmanship are embedded in a culture. Accordingly, they are part of the cultural context and personal knowledge of the actor since they are standards that he has assimilated into himself. Since they are culturally defined, they are shared to a greater or less degree by all members of that culture. For instance, everyone knows that plastered walls should be flat, smooth and perfectly square. But the plasterer's personal knowledge of standards is more elaborate than that of the layman. The plasterer's standards of 'flatness' may cause him to feel intensely irritated about a slight ripple in the surface of the plaster that would go unnoticed by the average person. Furthermore, the question arises as to whether or not any two plasterers would agree on the flatness of any given wall. It is unlikely, but why is this so?

...each person has their own set of standards that they have acquired by experiencing each performance. These have become their personal knowledge. since each person's experiences are intrinsically different, ultimately their knowledge is different. Consequently, discrepancies in judgment that occur between laymen, dilletantes (sic), and connoisseurs are a result of the amount and refinement of their own personal knowledge of a set of standards. The more refined these standards are, the more critical and demanding of the object and ultimately its maker the appraisals will be." (p. 53~4)

Ah, the good old days, the 1970's, when there were still standards of excellence to be observed and understood in the building arts. I do jest, but only a little I'm afraid. A lot of what I've observed, especially in recent years, is that not only do clients have little to no idea of what constitutes good workmanship, but the people doing the work, whether it be framing walls, applying sheetrock, plaster, casing stairwells, hanging acoustical ceiling etc., seem to have little or no internalized standard of what is good work and what is not. Or if they do have such a standard, many would appear to not give a damn about such things, that they know even if the work is poor they still get paid and the client doesn't notice so.... The problem here is that many workers in the trades do not seem to have assimilated into themselves, as Link put it, high standards of work. Possibly because, in North America at least, examples of high standards of workmanship are seldom encountered in daily life except in certain mass-produced items, like Apple Computers, or BMW sedans, say, or food in certain restaurants where the chef is highly trained and passionate about what they do.

The last job I was working on for another contractor was a place to hear the usual comments of, 'oh, from 20' away nobody will notice that', etc.. The last time, upon hearing it in a conversation with a co-worker, I turned to him and said, "I don't care what someone else may or may not notice. How would you do the work if this was your own house? Would it matter to you then?" My coworker had nothing further to say, curiously enough, but I am left wondering where/how the internal guidance system, the morality, dare I say it, of doing the right thing, doing a solid careful job, even though no one else may notice or care, became disconnected for many who who pick up a hammer and tool apron -or other tools for that matter.

Link sums up her look at standards of workmanship with the following contention:

"In regard to technical behavior, there is always a difference in excellence judged to be skilled or unskilled workmanship. As far as the connoisseur goes, skill is judged on the basis of the output of the project. As far as judgment of artisans by their peers goes, each is judged as a member of a class. As far as the judgment of artisans by themselves goes, each is skillful to the degree which they achieve their self-imposed standards. Here the actor, the artisan, is his own critic. Consequently, actors who have very refined standards have become connoisseurs, and as long as they are physically able to carry on their behavior in conformance with these standards, they are good, skilled artisans; experts and masters of their trade."

In the end, the only really qualified judge of an artisan's work is the artisan himself, or one with equivalent technical mastery and understanding of the medium. Others may like or dislike the work for various reasons, aesthetic or philosophical, but ultimately the buck stops with the maker. If that person does not hold out high standards for themselves or becomes content with where they are in terms of the quality of what they make, then their continued ascension in skill and workmanship is stopped. To progress, the idea must always be, not yet, not yet.

In the next part of this review, I will turn to Link's experiences and observations during her time living and working with the Tsuzuki family of sashimono-shi, in Kusakabe City. I hope you'll stay tuned and thanks for dropping by today.