Keyaki and Chestnut Tabi-dansu 4

Happy (very belated) New Year everyone. It’s been a few weeks since my last post on the keyaki tabi-dansu, and I’m long overdue to share an update. A lot of progress has been made over the past few weeks, and I’m moving as fast as I can to get these three cabinets done before the end of January. I took a few days off over New Years but otherwise it’s been crunchtime in the shop.

Thanks a ton to everyone who commented on the last post where I shared the unfortunate mistake I made regarding the placement of the shelves on the keyaki cabinet. I didn’t respond to all the comments but I’m really grateful to everyone who commented. It was nice to hear other folks share their own stories/mishaps. I think all craftspeople who are really invested in what they make have a tendency to feel embarrassed and shocked when they screw up, and it’s easy to dwell on it for longer than you should. The reality is that it happens and it sucks, but no one is perfect… and a little commiseration can really cheer a person up. So thanks again.

Since writing that last post I got more quartersawn keyaki (perhaps even nicer than the first batch), and have completely rebuilt the keyaki tabi-dansu to the proper dimensions. I won’t cover the full build, but here are a few things that I did differently this time.

For trimming the box joints and tenons after assembly I used the router again, but this time I used a couple of 3mm shims double-stick taped to the base of the router to give better clearance over the proud joints. The shims were especially helpful for the box joints. I also clamped a scrap piece of wood to the side of the cabinet, ensuring that it was flush with the top surface of the cabinet, to give the router full support when trimming the box joints. I skipped this step the first time around, but it leaves the router largely unsupported on one side, and there’s much more risk of the router tilting, which will cut deeper into the box joint, screwing up the final surface. So I played it extra safe this time around.

One of the final steps for the cabinet which I didn’t cover before was pegging the box joints. I used 5mm tapered oak pegs, which are the largest tapered pegs that I could find. In the past I’ve used straight dowels for pegging joints, but if available I much prefer tapered pegs. They’re easier to drive in, and especially if you’re gluing them in, there’s a much better chance that the glue will stay where it needs to be when the peg is driven in. (With straight dowel, whether the glue is applied to the dowel or the hole, the action of driving the peg in can squeeze the glue off or drive it into the bottom of the hole).

Here’s a peg and a Star M tapered drill bit to match.

Star M’s tapered drills are perfect for tapered pegs, but I find that they like to wander a bit, so I ended using an awl and a brad point bit to pinpoint and start the hole for the tapered drill.

I used a very basic jig as a guide when drilling. Basically just a joined block of wood with the proper peg layout and spacing marked out. The layout lines and edge of the jig itself were also used to help me guide the drill straight and true when predrilling for the pegs.

With the jig in place I made a few marks on the cabinet indicating the location of each peg. Then used the awl to mark a point, the brad point bit to lightly start the hole, and finally the tapered drill to finish. All in all things came out really clean.

I set a slight angle to the jig, so the pegs are not driven in perfectly perpendicular. The slight angle allowed me to set the starting hole for the pegs slightly further back from the corner of the cabinet, which helps avoid blowing out the end grain when driving in the peg, which can be surprizingly tight.

Here’s one corner with all the pegs driven in from both sides of the cabinet. I used Titebond Liquid Hide glue for the pegs (and for the rest of the cabinet as well).

Chestnut Tabi-dansu

With the keyaki carcase complete I moved on to the next cabinet, which is a slightly larger and more complex tabi-dansu inspired cabinet in Japanese chestnut. Most of the construction is the same as what I covered in the posts on the keyaki cabinet so I won’t repeat the details, but I’ll share some photos from the build.

Here are the basic cabinet panels with completed box joints. Chestnut is a common hardwood in Japan but it’s not common in wide boards, or at least not at a reasonable price, so I glued the panels up from multiple boards, looking for the best grain matches I could get. Chestnut also tends to have more knots, so I ended up having to make a few patches to cover the worst spots, but hid any knots and patches on the interior of the cabinet.

Mortising was pretty much identical to the keyaki cabinet; drill, chop and pare.

Once again I routed a shallow dado between the mortises to give the mating shelf extra resistance to warping.

Here is the interior of the top panel with completed mortises and dado.

Being larger in size, the chestnut cabinet also had a slightly different shelf arrangement. There’s a partition running down the middle of the cabinet with shelves vertically offset on each side. With the slightly more complex arrangement, I decided to create a story stick to aid in laying out the joints, instead of relying on measurements alone. Below you can see the middle partition with story stick after doing some layout.

The story stick is done in a similar style to what is sometimes used in Japanese carpentry. Essentially each side of the stick can reference a different series of measurements, but they can and often do reference common points. In this case the front edge of the cabinet was the baseline from which I referenced all the measurements layed out on the story stick.

And a bit more mortising on the middle partition:

And more dadoing as well:

After the joinery was cut and fit, I hand planed every surface and started assembling the cabinet.

At this point everything was dry fit to ensure all the parts were coming together. With all the joints closing up nicely, I removed the top and bottom, applied some glue and went for the full glue up. I used liquid hide glue throughout on this cabinet (as well as the keyaki tabi dansu), and I have to say I’m really enjoying using hide glue again. For one thing my shop is unheated and the daily temp is below the recommended working temp for Titebond II or III. With the hide glue I can simply warm it up in a water bath and it’s easy as can be to use, and it cures fine regardless of the cold.

Here are some wedges with hide glue driven into the mortises for one of the shelves.

And the outside of the cabinet with more glued in wedges to lock in the shelves.

And at last here are the two cabinet carcases complete!

Both of these will ultimately be getting a bit of chemical stain turning them subtely different shades of brown, but here they sit in their natural states. Despite the fact that I designed these cabinets in 3D and made all sorts of realistic renderings, the scale of them was still a bit of a shock upon completion. Pictures and 3D modelling can never truly give a sense of scale IMO.

One last picture to wrap things up….

Thus far throughout this project I’ve been chipping away at the doors. The ドア are a detail that I’ve been considering for a long time now, and I finally decided to go ahead with veneered doors on all three cabinets. I’ll go into more on the doors in another post, but essentially I went with veneer with the aim of having the most lightweight and dimensionally stable door panel possible. Here’s a look at the shop sawn veneer for the chestnut cabinet being edge glued prior to laminating.

I’ll be back soon with more on the doors and the final and most complex cabinet for this series.

Thanks for reading.