Colgate EALL (9)

With the benches out of the way, I have a couple of items to finish up for the Japanese room before turning to the Chinese room and its woodwork.

One task that presented itself was to create the crossbeam which supports the alcove post, toko-bashira, and serves double duty as the upper sliding track, or kamo-i for a pair of sliding doors below. For those door, a sill, or shiki-i, also needed to be fabricated.

I cannot obtain avodire, at least not in the US, in the thickness required for the beam, so I laminated some pieces together:

There's more than meets the eye here, as the lower portion of the beam is in fact a piece of black cherry:

You may wonder, why is he doing this? As mentioned in the video which accompanied the preceding blog post, I find avodire to have a quality of having rather high surface friction when you are fitting things together. It is not a wood which slides around easily, so I think it would be a poor choice for the sliding tracks and the frames for the sliding doors. Black cherry, on the other hand has much more suitable characteristics, and is beautiful to boot, however this aspect will be largely out of view.

I used my portable grooving machine to rough out the tracks in the beam:

And with a change in the depth setting, the sill-piece was similarly roughed out:

Then I used a router with edge guide to trim the grooves to a more exact width:

The top of the beam is formed into a tongue which will carry some spacing pieces that support both the alcove floor panel, toko-ita, as well as the floor panel under the staggered shelf assembly. I roughed out the tongue on the table saw, then cleaned up on the shaper:

The result:

A few more steps remain on this beam, however my attention next turned to the spacing pieces which attach to that newly-formed tongue on the topside:

The alcove post, toko-bashira, will sit on the beam in the divide between the two spacers. The fit of the t&g joints, though not too tight, is sufficiently snug that with the high sliding friction of avodire I am disinclined to fully put the parts together at this time, not wanting disassembly struggles.

Another view:

No point pushing the pieces all the way together quite yet, or I will have a wrestle to separate them.

All for this round - thanks for tuning it to my site. Comments most welcome. Post 10 is next in this thread.