Moving along with fabrication of the low cherry tansu. After cutting the hidden mitered dovetails on the corners of the main cabinet, I started working on the interior partitions, shelves, and drawer dividers along with their respective mortise and tenon joinery. Overall the joinery for the interior components is very similar to the two upper tabi-dansu, there’s just more of it. The rendering below shows the arrangement of shelves, partitions and shelf dividers for all three cabinets.
Back when I was first designing this cabinet I imagined joining all the interior panels using wedged mortise and tenons wherever possible, but after giving it more thought I scaled things back a bit. The final design I settled on was to use wedged through mortises in these locations:
Wedged through tenons in those locations should add a ton of strength and solidity to the cabinet, and effectively lock everything together, such that should a panel move in anyway the wedged tenons will add a lot of mechanical resistance beyond just glue. The remaining 4 shelves (2 uppers on the left, 2 in the center) will get blind mortise and tenons.
The process for cutting the joinery was more or less identical to what I covered in the keyaki tabi-dansu series, so I’ll skip the details and just give a quick overview.
Below is the left side panel after mortising. The lowest row of mortises are the flared through mortises, the upper 2 rows are blind mortises going 20mm deep in a 25mm thick panel. At this point the dadoes for the shelves weren’t yet cut, but that happened soon after.
Here is the right side partition with dadoes and blind mortises (not visible from this angle) for the 2 central shelves, and flared through mortises for the drawer dividers coming in from the opposite side.
After cutting all the mortises and dadoes, I marked out the tenon locations and started by hand sawing the tenon width.
I used the Petty Work saw to cut the shoulders as I did on the other cabinets, but this time I also made repeated cuts to establish the tenon thickness.
I had previously done this step using a router, but thought I’d try something different this time.
This little adjustable stop which can be attached to the fixed table of the Petty Work saw is super handy for this kind of task.
Here is one of the panels after repeated cuts to roughly establish the tenon thickness.
And the rest of the set.
To fine tune the fit I used a kiwa-ganna (Japanese corner cutting plane). I planed each panel until the tenons just started to fit into their respective dadoes/mortises.
Another thing I did differently this time around was to use my circular saw to cut out the waste between the tenons. (For those of you in the U.S. don’t scoff at my Ryobi… here in Japan they make really nice tools.)
Here’s the cut after using the circular saw. Again on the previous cabinets I used the router to cutout this area, but this method proved to be much faster.
Here’s the stack of shelves, partitions, and drawer dividers with tenons all cut.
Then it was time to finish plane. I used two kanna for all the planing. One a 60 mm Ishido which has been one of my regular use kanna for a long time. The other is a 70 mm Yuzawa that I pulled out of storage just for fun. I hadn’t used the Yuzawa much up to this point, but it turned out to be a great plane. (sorry I forgot to take pictures during actual planing!)
And finally it was time for assembly. With such a big cabinet, and complicated arrangement of parts/joinery, I worked in stages, gluing up sections of the cabinet one at a time. To begin with, I assembled the partitions and central shelves to the bottom panel. Since the central shelves are joined with blind mortise and tenon joints I glued up and clamped them, but at this point the tenons joining with the bottom panel were left without glue. Later I secured them with wedges.
Next I brought in the top panel, which engaged with the tenons and dadoes on the ends of the partitions, and then I could start on the left side assembly. The left side, with three shelves and the end panel, all had to be brought together simultaneously. Again the upper two shelves with blind mortise and tenons, got glue, while the lower shelf with wedged through tenons was assembled dry. I also glued the hidden mitered dovetail joints as well.
Once the joints with glue were tight, I installed wedges in the lowest shelf to secure that panel as well. The wedges got drop of glue to fix them in place.
Here’s a peak at one of the glued up hidden mitered dovetails. I used Titebond liquid hide glue throughout this glue up, which in an unheated shop in January can be tricky to use. When cold, the glue gels up and is completely unusable, so throughout this glue up I had two bottles warming up in an old yogurt maker. Warming the glue gets it nice and runny and easy to work with, but as soon as it hits the cold wood it starts to gel up again. Initially I had trouble closing the dovetails because of the glue gelling, but after a bit of extra clamping, as well as a bit of mild heat from a heat gun to warm up the wood, everything came together.
I left the cabinet sit overnight in the above state to give the glue time to dry, and in the morning came back and glued up the right side of the cabinet. The right side was more straightforward since the two drawer dividers with wedged tenons didn’t need glue at this point, so I was able to focus mainly on gluing up the hidden mitered dovetails.
Here’s the cabinet with clamps removed and wedges installed in all the right places.
In this close up you can see where the wedges have been trimmed back. Later I came in with a router and chisel to flush trim the protruding tenons.
That’s all for this week. Coming up I’ll cover the making of the doors for all three cabinets which inolved shop sawn veneer and lamination using a vacuum press, as well as the making of the cabinet backs. So stay tuned for that.
