Low Cherry Tansu – Ken-don 倹飩 Door

With the main cabinet more or less complete I moved on to making the single ken-don 倹飩 door for this cabinet. In a previous post I described how a ken-don door works but I thought I’d add a little visual clarity for those who may be new to this style. In the image below on the left the door is closed and housed within grooves in the top and bottom of the cabinet. The upper groove is deeper, so to open the door first you slide the whole door up (middle image), and then pull the bottom edge out (right image). From there the whole door can be removed. This method is commonly used for sliding doors on furniture as well as for standard shoji screens here in Japan. It’s also often seen on smaller tansu like tabi-dansu. The overall aesthetic is really clean as the door fills the entire opening and there are no hinges of any kind.

Mitered Bridle Joints

The first step was to layout the joinery for the door frame. I used mitered bridle joints to join the corners of the door frame. I find these joints to be really solid and strong, and also easier to control during glue-up since the bridle joint helps to keep the miters from slipping and sliding around.

I used a hand saw to cut the tenons and mortises. This could have easily been done with a table saw and a few simple jigs but since I just had this one door to make I thought it’d be just as quick to do the cutout by hand.

Next I cut the miters on the frame pieces. For these cuts I used the tablesaw to rough cut the joints, staying just a touch beyond my layout lines. From there I fine tuned the fit of each miter, using a couple hand planes to sneak up on my layout lines. I also made sure to check that each corner came together gap free at the miter while forming a true 90 degree angle when joined together. The miters on the pieces that have the tenon obviously can’t be trimmed with a standard block plane as pictured below. Instead I used a small kiwa-ganna (Japanese rabbet plane) to trim those miters, but my apologies as I forgot to take pictures during that step.

Below are the corner joints after trimming and fitting. You can also see that I cut a groove in each rail and stile for fitting the door panel.

Slip-matched Door Panel

The door panel consists of slip-matched quartersawn pieces of cherry. I ripped the panel pieces off of a larger board on the bandsaw, and marked and labelled each piece as it was cut. That allows you to arrange the boards sequentially while maintaining the same grain direction. Doing so gives the overall panel a very consistent appearance. Since I planned to hand plane the panel, keeping the grain direction consistent was important not only because it makes dealing with tearout and reversing grain less of a problem, but also light will reflect differently off of boards that have reversing grain right next to one another. This style of grain matching is called slip matching, and is fairly common practice in Japan. It’s particularly common on ceiling panels, where if you look closely you will see that boards laid out across a ceiling will have uniform light reflection and you can see a consistency to the grain.

I chose quartersawn grain for a few different reasons. First this door is quite wide and quartersawn grain will be more stable and less likely to move overtime compared to flatsawn grain. I also like the clean aesthetic you get from the straight grain lines. Lastly, the antique tabi-dansu that were my inspiration for this cabinet also have quartersawn door panels. I wanted to keep the aesthetic consistent with those old cabinets, particularly since I planned to stack them on top of this one.

To glue up the door panel I used dominoes to align each piece with it’s neighbor. I joined each piece on the jointer and then used a hand plane to adjust each seam. When I do edge joining I like to use a hand plane to smooth out the surface left by the jointer and also to create a “sprung” joint. With a sprung joint the goal is to ever so slightly curve the surface of two mating edges such that the ends of the boards will touch one another, but there will be a hairline gap in the middle. Doing so helps to prevent the ends of the seams from opening up overtime as wood movement will be more pronounced towards the end grain of the panel. I also like this method because often one or two clamps in the middle of your glue-up are enough to close the seams.

After glue-up I cut the panel to size. To fit the panel in the door frame I planned to cut a rabbet all around the panel to form a tongue that would fit the groove I previously cut in the door frame. Below you can see one edge with the tongue cut.

Before cutting the tongue all around the panel I did a test fit with the door frame.

After cutting the panel to final size and rabbeting the perimeter, I started hand planing. Cherry is a joy to plane. The color and depth of the wood really start to show as soon as you start taking shavings.

After the door panel, I hand planed the frame pieces as well.

With the door parts planed, I moved on to glue-up. I used just a touch of glue to fix the panel to the center of the long frame members. That will keep the panel centered while allowing the sides to float in the frame. The panel can then expand and contract evenly towards the sides of the door throughout the seasons.

Here you can see the 1.5mm gap I left for expansion. I left an even gap this size on both the left and right side of the door.

Once the glue was dry, I unclamped the door and all that remained was a bit of trimming to get it to fit within the cabinet. I also installed two pieces of hardware on the door.

Below you can see a sneak peak of the finished door. I really like the look of the slip-matched panel, and overall I think it matches well with the old tabi-dansu’s doors on top.

In the next and final post for this project I’ll cover some of the finishing touches and share some pictures of the finished cabinet. Thanks for reading.