Battari Shōgi 9

Another day of work on the myriad set of tasks needing to be done on this fold up bench. I accomplished most of the tasks on my list from yesterday, and a few additional ones.

First off, I processed the mortises and shallow laps on two of the cross-rails - these to receive the Lignum Vitae spindles:


These joints need a little work yet, and I'll detail their relationship with the spindles in a clearer manner when I work the on the spindles and fit them to these cross-pieces.

For the time-being, I set those cross-pieces aside, and then continued on with the hinge insert work - this time, for the swing-down legs:


I'm finding that my timber framing chisels (atsu-nomi) are handling the Wenge chopping a little better than my bench chisels:



In this case, I will place an insert on each side of the leg, at a depth of 0.625". That leaves a web of Wenge in-between the inserts about 0.375" thick.

In the next shot, the inserts are in, cleaned off flush to the surrounding wood, and marked for drilling:


I went and picked up a pair of brand new Forstner bits to tackle the drilling for the spindles and floating pins (two different sizes), anticipating some challenges, however the Lignum Vitae works much more pleasantly than the Wenge, with no burning or fuss whatsoever:


Next step with the swing-out legs will be to mortise them for the stretcher (I'll be using twin tenons in a simple housing), and profile them to a shape similar to the bolsters. Also, I will take that web of Wenge in-between the two Lignum Vitae inserts on each leg and relieve it back a small distance,so as to minimize any possibility of the leg shrinking and binding on the spindles over a narrow band.

I drilled with the Forstner about 3/4 of the way in to depth, and then used a template routing bit to take the pin mortises on the bolsters to exact depth- in this case, 1.125":


A look down the rabbit hole, I can see that the dust needs wiping out:


Here's the two bolsters with their hinge inserts complete:


The bolsters themselves were not complete, and needed quite a bit of additional work. First off I patched a couple of small bug holes (god knows what sort of insect can bore into this material!) using the expedient of some tapered circular plugs. Here I am trimming the plugs with a flush-cutting saw, or kugi-hiki nokogiri:


Cleaned off, the result was passable, though not invisible I thought - it's a bit of a crap shoot trying to get a good match with the plugs and patches, even with attention to the grain orientation. The Wenge's irregular alternating layers of soft light brown material with the harder black material causes this difficulty:


The left hand side bolster is visible to view on it's outer face, and there was a defect that needed patching:


Cleaned off, it came out reasonably well:


You can also see in the above picture a side-view of the edge profile I have given to the outside edges of the bolster. I'll show these more clearly in some later pictures.

All for today, - over and out. Thanks for dropping by. Up next: post 10