Screen Play (20)

Long day today but not too many pictures. This is the 20th installment of a thread describing the design and construction of a Japanese freestanding screen, or tsuitate. If you haven't visited in a while, or are new to this blog, you may wish to peruse previous postings, which are archived to the right of the page.

All day long I worked away on the grill bars, or kōshi. In previous episodes I had planed them to dimension, and last week I had commenced cutting the lap joints. Today I cut out the mitered abutment housings and then used a chisel to trim the 45˚ miters. Since I've amply covered that sort of thing in previous blog entries, I decided to forgo pictures. Same old same old eh?

After the joints were cut out, I chamfered the pieces:


There are 26 bars altogether, and - get this - they are of 4 distinct types. That's a clue. Here's the pile of bars after all the cut out was over:


Why am I giving 'clues'? This is just lapped grill work, snooze...wake me when it's over. When am I going to get to the good stuff?

Well, this isn't any ordinary grill work, it is mystery grill work. All the sticks, I'll say at the outset, are continuous intact pieces - no laminated bits or glued-in inserts. I'm using these 26 pieces and no others.

...

I'm going to try and have some fun with this, and I hope the reader will indulge me. Here's another clue - the grill work I'm going to do in this project is of the same type as the grill work in the following little structure:


Notice anything unusual about the grill? Well, maybe you will and maybe you won't, however I'm going one better by using mitered laps so the front arrises of the bars can be chamfered.

I may drop more clues in later posts, I may not. What I won't do is show the details of the joints in these bars. That would give it away. Maybe.

All for today. Thanks for dropping by. Ready for more? --> post 21