White Oak Shoji Cabinet – Finale

We made it to the finish folks, this is the last post for the White Oak Shoji Cabinet project. Thanks for following along.

With the shoji doors finished, there were just a few remaining tasks to conclude the cabinet. The first was to install the back slats. The slats fit into a groove in the top and bottom of the cabinet, and are cut with a shiplap joint. A shiplap joint involves cutting a recess down both edges of each slat, allowing the slats to overlap one another. Below is a cross section view of the shiplap back.

The beauty of this style of back is that it’s fairly easy to produce and has a simple but elegant look. With this style of back it’s also easy to deal with moisture/humidity issues. By giving a bit of a gap between each slat (in this case just 1 mm on each side) and pinning each slat independently of one another the slats can move freely with changes in humidity. Conversely if I installed the boards without any gap, and/or glued them to one another, there’s a chance that the boards could swell in the hot humid summer and push against the sides of the cabinet. If that happened there’s a good chance that some nasty damage could occur to the cabinet.

When I installed the slats I wanted to keep the gap between each slat consistent. So before screwing them in place I cut up some thin cardboard to use as spacers and evenly spaced out the boards. Once I felt good about the spacing I secured each slat in position with screws.

Below you can see the finished cabinet back, with an even gap/shadow line between each board.

Around the same time, I also finished installing the LED lighting. The cabinet has a strip of LED’s that shine down from the top of the cabinet. Turning the LED’s on and off and adjusting brightness is all controlled with a remote control. I installed 6mm thick glass shelves to allow the light to flow down through the cabinet.

With the lighting and back components installed the cabinet was essentially complete. The main final task was to construct a crate and pack the cabinet for shipping overseas. But before that here are a few final images of the finished cabinet.

Here is the cabinet packed up in the crate just prior to shipping. When it was all said and done, this thing weighed a ton! The cabinet without shelving could be lifted by a couple of people but 12 sheets of 6mm thick glass really added to the weight, not to mention all the plywood used for the crate. I don’t know what I would have done without the help of my friends to slide this thing out of the shop and onto a fork-lift.

This project had a fair share of challenges, the biggest being the shop where I work in Tokyo turned out to be too small to build a cabinet this large. I could have technically built the cabinet in the shop, but getting it out would have been impossible. Thankfully the guys at Somakosha let me use their shop, which in the end turned out to be a much better solution than building the cabinet in Tokyo. Working out of a shop in the countryside with lots of space, fresh air, and good friends nearby was ultimately the best way to go.

I shipped the cabinet out in mid-August. Pre-covid shipping probably would have taken about a month, but with all sorts of covid influenced delays at the ports it ended up taking a bit over 3 months to arrive at the clients home. Thankfully everything arrived safely and the cabinet is finally installed in the clients home.

Thanks for following along with this project, and to those who have been commenting. It’s much appreciated to hear that people are enjoying these posts.

-Jon