Keyaki Tabi-dansu

Earlier this year I introduced an upcoming tansu commission through a couple of posts about the overall scope, and joinery considerations for the series of cabinets. It’s been many month since those posts, but the past few weeks I’ve finally started work on the project. To quickly recap, I’ll be building three cabinets, one long low cabinet with legs and two tabi-dansu style cabinets which will sit on top. Here’s a rendering of the overall concept:

The rendering above isn’t representative of the final wood choices selected for each cabinet. Ultimately the low cabinet will be cherry; the large tabi-dansu will be made from kuri (Japanese chestnut) with a dark stain; and the smallest cabinet will be made from keyaki, also with a dark stain.

I’m starting with the smallest cabinet of the bunch.

After a bit of searching, I managed to source some really nice boards of quartersawn keyaki for the main components of the cabinet. Here I’m resawing one of those boards to get two pieces that I can glue up for the bottom of the cabinet.

For the tool nerds out there, the bandsaw above is a Hitachi cb75f saw. For it’s resaw capacity (315mm/12.4″) it’s a relatively small saw, which makes it great for a small shop where space is limited. The small size makes it’s easy to attach casters to and move around the shop. The blade pictured is a pretty standard blade for these machines and it’s about 75mm (3″) wide but only has a thin 1mm thick kerf. It’s a joy to use for resawing.

Here are a couple of the other nice quartersawn keyaki boards after resawing, edge jointing and gluing. These will become the cabinet sides.

And here are the top and bottom panels being glued up.

Once the glue was dry I moved on to cutting the panels to size, and put the Pettywork saw to use for that task. In order to accomodate the large size of the panels I swapped out the stock fence on the Pettywork with a longer one. (It’s excessively long in the photo below, but I took these photos prior to cutting the fence down to a more normal length.)

The Pettywork’s stop is pretty basic, but it’s definitely nice an accurate. Nice seeing the freshly cut end of one side of the panel cleanly butting up to the stop.

With the panels cut to length I started laying out the joinery for the corners of the cabinet. This tabi-dansu as well as the other, will both be getting pegged box joints. I layed out the joinery for each corner by clamping together each mating pair.

An important step before cutting the joints is to go around and lightly chop the layout lines with a chisel. I used to skip this step but started doing it again after teaching a few workshops this past summer with my friend Yamamoto-san, and we always tell students to do it… it is really good practice, and not only gives you a really clear place to register your chisel when you move on to final paring, but it also *helps* to prevent tearout at precious edges when rough cutting a joint.

After scoring the layout lines I moved on to sawing the cheeks of the box joints.

I played around with a couple saws for these cuts. The first I tried was a super thin 0.2mm Nakaya rip saw. These saws are great, and the thin kerf makes it really easy to track your progress. The downside is that they are really succeptable to wandering, and you have much less ability to adjust the angle of the saw if you start to veer off your line.

Another saw I used was a handmade ryoba saw that I got professionally sharpened a few years ago. Handmade saws are expensive and so is resharpening, so I usually stick to replaceable blade saws. But on occassion it’s fun to put one to use. A well sharpened handmade saw really does cut beautifully.

I also put a circular saw and guide to use for roughing out the waste between the box joints.

For the final trimming of these joints, I stood each panel up on end and used a router to trim down to the shoulder line. A couple of boards clamped on flush with the end of the panel made for a much safer, wider surface to support the router.

Here’s a look with one of the boards removed showing the box joints after routing out the last bit of material.

And here are the sides, top and bottom, after roughing out the joints.

From there I moved on to fine tuning each joint and test fitting. Each joint took just a little bit of work with a chisel, and I mainly only had to trim the handsawn cheeks where my sawing was slightly off the line.

I really like the look of these joints, and especially with nice quartersawn material like this keyaki, the finished cabinet should look pretty clean.

Next up was layout for the shelf joinery in the sides of the cabinet. Each shelf will be joined with a set of wedged through tenons. Below you can see the layout for the through tenons.

Cutting the mortises started with the same process of lightly chopping the layout lines with a chisel. The long sides of the mortise below have an extra set of lines on the outside, which are my layout lines for flaring the mortises to accept the wedges later on.

Here’s another mortise after the next step, rough drilling.

And then some chopping and cleanup with a chisel.

And finally working from both sides I cleaned up the mortise until the inner walls were clean and square from both sides. Later after getting all the mortises to this state, I’ll come back with a paring jig set with a slight angle and flare the mortises from the outside only.

That’s all for this week. Lots more work to go on these cabinets so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading.