Keyaki Tabi-dansu 3

Before finishing assembly of the keyaki tabi-dansu, there were a few other details to take care of. Mainly a pair of grooves in the top and bottom panels which will house the door, as well as a rabbet on the back edge of all panels that will hold the cabinet back.

This time I decided to tackle the grooves starting with none other than a “groover”, also known as a 溝切カッター (mizo-kiri-katta) in Japanese. These machines are much faster and cleaner than routers (they’re basically a heavy duty circular saw with a dado blade). They can hog out a lot more material in one pass, and with a sharp blade the finished groove is super clean. In this case I only had a sharp 12mm cutter handy, and needed to make 15mm grooves for the doors, so I used the groover for a rough pass, and then finished with a router and edge guide.

Here are the top and bottom panels clamped and supported for grooving:

First pass roughly down the middle for the bottom track…

…And a slightly deeper rough pass for the upper groove.

Here’s the router setup I used to finishing the grooves.

One process which I can’t tackle in my new shop is ripping large panels to width. Honestly it was a task that I kind of overlooked when I was sourcing machines and planning out the shop. The table saw that I do have has a pretty limited rip capacity, and no apparent way of extending it. But I’m going to look into some options. In the meantime I dealt with ripping panels to their final width by using a circular saw and shopmade saw guide.

With the panels ripped to width I could use the groover to cut the rabbets in the back of each panel for the cabinet back. (Up to this point I had been using the front edge of each panel as a reference for all layout and cutting and left the back edge uncut).

Here’s a close up of one of the stopped rabbets after running the groover in 2 passes to get the width I needed.

Then I simply chopped the corner square with a couple of chisels.

And with the door grooves and back rabbets done I could move on to the final glue up.

Here’s the setup with the bottom being glued and clamped.

And the next morning I finished the glue up with the top panel.

With the panels being finish planed before assembly I really wanted to minimize glue squeezing out onto the clean, planed wood, and a bit of masking tape definitely helped with that.

Here’s another view of the cabinet assembly.

Once the glue was dry I started in on cleaning up the joints. I left all the box joints and wedged tenons about 1-2 mm proud, with the plan being to trim everything flush after assembly. Lately I’ve been trimming through tenons with the router. It makes for a very quick and accurate way to bring the tenons nearly flush with the surface, leaving just a hair to trim with a hand plane. In the past I’ve used a flush cut saw, but I’ve had issues with the blade scoring the surrounding wood. The router eliminates that issue.

This time I used the router on the box joints as well.

Then I sharpened up a small plane and started taking the tenons and box joints down until they were nice and flush.

This quartersawn keyaki was a joy to plane throughout this project, and the end grain was no exception. Sometimes end grain can be a complete nightmare, but this material had a very consistent density that made it really nice to plane regardless of the grain direction. I took light passes and sharpened my plane a few times to get the cleanest surface possible, and in the end the results were really satisfying.

And with that the cabinet assembly was done.

I’m liking the joinery combination of the box joints and wedged tenons. Structurally they’re both really solid forms of joinery, and aesthetically they work well too.

This project has been in the works for a long time now, and the clients have been very patiently waiting, so I didn’t exactly have time to spare. That said, I really tried to take my time and focus to make sure everything came out clean and tidy, especially when doing the joinery.

Box joints are pretty common on Japanese tansu, but it wasn’t until I saw one of Yann Giguere’s furniture pieces back in NY that I realized just how nice they could look. Yann’s work has been a good source of inspriation, and I was thinking one of his pieces a lot when cutting these joints.

So the good news is that assembly went well, all the parts fit, and things came out neat and tidy….

…now for the bad news.

I did the drawings for this series of cabinets almost a year ago now, and the drawings with dimensions were reviewed by all parties and approved. As I was finishing up assembly of this cabinet and started reviewing the drawings for the next one I caught a measurement error related to the spacing of the shelves. The short story is that the clients requested a specific shelf spacing early on during the design phase, and I adjusted the design to account for their request. The problem was that when I added dimensions to the drawing I accidentally set the start point for the first shelf’s spacing in the wrong location, and from there I adjusted the height per their request. The result was that the shelf ended up being lower than planned. Even though the clients and interior designer approved of the drawing, no one, including myself, caught the error until it was too late.

That was a major “oh shit” moment, and not a happy one.

So after a bit of back and forth talking with the interior designer about possible solutions, the outcome is that I’ll be making this cabinet again. It’s a bummer to have to start over, but with the cabinet assembled there’s very little that can be done, and the clients have a specific use in mind so it’s important that it has the required dimensions and shelf spacing.

On the bright side, I was able to source more quartersawn keyaki and the stock I recieved actually looks even nicer than what I used for the first cabinet. Getting the material was a big relief. Also not that there were many other issues the first time around, but it kind of feels nice to have had a warm up of sorts, and process-wise there are a few things I’ll probably do slightly differently for round 2.

Also one of the nice things about this series of cabinets is their modularity, so once I finish this cabinet, it will definitely be useful and able to stand on it’s own. And ultimately I’ll be looking for a buyer… so if anyone out there is looking for a tabi-dansu with some really nice keyaki, don’t be shy!