Making Koushi-do – Planing and Assembly

The final step before assembling the koushi-do was handplaning. This is one stage of work that I really love. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as taking clean shavings of wood, leaving a shiny smooth surface. The surface off the plane is the final surface. No sanding, oil or finish required. I spent about 3 1/2 – 4 days on the planing for these doors. That may seem like a long time, but I imagine it would have taken even longer if you were to sand all these parts. And the result wouldn’t be nearly as crisp or have the same sheen.

I started by planing the door rails and stiles.

Towards the end of the day the shavings really started to add up.

It’s always fun to plane parts with mortises. The shavings that come out of the plane are always interesting, dotted with the rectangular holes.

All of the koushi and the inner edges of the rails got a 3 mm chamfer. I rough cut the chamfer on the router table and then finished the chamfer with a mentori-ganna; a specialty plane made for planing chamfers. Here’s a cute little pile of shavings from the mentori-ganna.

Below I’m planing the special batch of koushi that I cut with the groover in the first post of this series.

When I was selecting and milling the wood for these doors the goal was to use clear heartwood for all the door parts. On sugi the heartwood (inner portion of the tree) tends to be reddish-brown, while sapwood (outer portion of the tree) is more of a creamy white. While going through the initial stack of lumber, we started to run out of clear heartwood material to use for all the parts. So we decided to make the koushi for these doors using clean white sap wood, making for a nice contrast with the red heartwood frame. In reality, sugi ages such that the contrast between sapwood and heartwood really mellows out. You can still tell the difference but overall things blend quite well.

All that is to say, that this batch of koushi (60 in total) are pure sugi sapwood, perhaps one of the most challenging woods to plane. It’s so soft and spongy that your blade has to be really fresh to get a clean shaving. Even when you do get good shavings it’s not long lasting as the wood is abrasive enough to quickly dull the blade. This batch wasn’t as bad as some sapwood I’ve planed. I was able to work through 4 sticks or so before resharpening.

Here are the small koushi after planing. Since there were a few hundred of these, I grouped 2 to 3 together at a time during planing.

Assembly

Assembly happened over the course of a few days. The first day I had help from two other friends who came and started assembling the first of the koushi-do, while I continued to finish the hand planing. Unfortunately I didn’t have much opportunity to take photos/video during the assembly phase, so the final shots here are going to be a bit brief.

Below are the short koushi-do doors with koushi and door rails assembled. In total there are 8 of these doors. Plus two other of a similar size, that go in a different location in the house.

And here is a door from the same batch after glueing and clamping the stiles.

We stashed all the doors in a room adjacent to the shop after assembly was complete. Here you can see the 8 doors from above, plus a few others as well.

Here is one of the doors with the white sapwood koushi. Its a subtle detail but you can just make out the three horizontal cross pieces that are recessed from the surface of the vertical koushi. Those cross pieces are set in the lap-joints that I cut back in the first post of this series. I’m excited to see these doors installed.

In addition to the koushi-do there were also three paneled doors. These doors have sugi frames like all the other doors, but also sugi panels. The wood for these panels is really beautiful straight grain material. The panels float in grooves cut in the rails and stiles.

Here is one of the completed paneled doors.

After assembly there were a few additional tasks to complete before installation. Including:

• trimming the stiles that I intentionally left extra long
• cutting the “horns” on the doors that will slide in tracks (this is a rabbet cut that allows the doors to fit in the shoji tracks)
• installation of hardware including door knobs and hinges on a few of the doors
• finally installing and fitting the doors themselves

My time with this project however is complete. I had 4 weeks available to fabricate the doors and managed to get them to this point. From here on my buddy will complete the final details and installation. I’m looking forward to taking a visit once things are done and hope to take a few photos of the doors installed if possible.

Hope you all enjoyed this short glimpse into door making here in Japan.