Making Shoji Screens

 

The past few weeks I’ve been taking a break from my folding screen project to make some shoji screens for a couple of buildings in PA.  The shoji screens are part of a project that my friend Yann of Mokuchi Woodworking has taken on.  There are 20 screens that need to be made in total, and I just finished making 8 of them.  The proportions and style were based on the existing screens.

The wood for the shojis is Alaskan yellow cedar, which is beautiful material to work with.  It machines super well, it’s really satisfying to hand plane, and it smells nice too.

This is what I started with, a stack of rough milled yellow cedar.

 

And after making a lot of chips and noise I ended up with a nice clean stack of milled parts for the rails and stiles.

 

The next step was to lay out all of the mortises.  There are three mortises per stile, two for the top and bottom rails and one for the rail that separates the kumiko grid from the panel.

 

After laying out all the mortise I then marked and cut the tenons.  Below are the tenons nearly complete.  The haunched tenons are for the top and bottom rails and the straight tenons are for the middle rails.  My first step was to cut the shoulders for all the tenons using the table saw, then I angled the blade and cut the angle for the haunches.  After that I used a shop-made tenoning jig to cut the cheeks.  For the cheek cuts I oversized the cut so that the tenons would be extra thick, then I used a horizontal router (multi-router) to do the final cleanup bringing the tenons to the right thickness.  I’ve never really been satisfied by cutting tenons to size straight off the table saw, there just always seems to be a bit of sloppiness in the cut, meaning the tenon is either too fat, too thin (really bad), or doesn’t have parallel sides.  But rough cutting on the table saw and then using the horizontal router really does a great job and makes for a really accurate result.

Also this yellow cedar machines beautifully….

 

Here are the mortises roughed out using a benchtop mortiser.  These were all cut slightly undersize with a 5/16″ hollow chisel, and then I pared the mortises to the final size of 3/8″ by hand.

 

These shojis get a chamfer all around the inside perimeter of the rails and stiles, and that detail needs to be taken into account when joining the rails and stiles.  One method for dealing with the chamfer is to cut the chamfer all the way down the length of the stiles and then angle the shoulder cut on the rails to mate with the chamfer.  The name for this is the jaguchi joint, and Des King covers cutting this joint in great detail in his first book.

Here’s an example of the jaguchi joint on an old shoji screen that I have in the shop.

 

Another method for dealing with a continuous chamfer around the rails and stiles is to miter the connection between the rails and stiles by the same dimension as the final chamfer.  This method also require a recess (or mitered abutment) to be cut on the stiles.  This is how the original screens were made, and how I dealt with the chamfer detail on the screens I’m building here.  It’s a difficult joint to describe so hopefully the pictures below will make more sense of the details.

Here are the miters cut on the rails.  Also there has been a groove cut on all the rails which will hold the kumiko grid and the bottom panel.  The grooves are sized so that they can be run down the full length of the rails, effectively cutting the tenons to their final width.

 

After cutting the little miters on all the rails, I then recessed the stiles where they would meet the rails.  The depth of the recess is set by the size of the chamfer which will be applied later once all the parts have been fitted together.

Below you can see the recess cut in the stile, which has yet to be mitered to fit with the rail.

 

Here I’m using a paring jig to cut and trim the miter on the stile.

 

And here is the finished miter.

 

After a little more tweaking here is the final fit.

 

The middle rails that separate the kumiko grid from the lower panel is mitered on both sides.  These were a bit trickier to fit, but using a paring jig worked out well since it allowed me to make small adjustments and creep up on a tight joint.

 

Here is the middle rail joined up with the stile.  The chamfer will soon be cut to the depth of the miter and recess in the stiles leaving a nice clean line.

 

Once I fit all the joints in the shoji frames it was time to move on to the kumiko.  After a fair amount of milling, I ended up with an nice clean stack of kumiko strips.  These are all fresh from the jointer and planer, and haven’t been hand planed yet.  All in all it amounts to 108 vertical kumiko and 48 horizontals, plus slightly thicker pieces (tsukeko) that frame out the kumiko grid.

 

 

Since I had so many joints to cut for these screens I decided to take a different approach to cutting the half-laps in these kumiko strips.  Instead of cutting everything by hand I used a table saw sled and I’ll detail that process in the following post.

I tried to take a lot of pictures throughout the entire process of making these screens but I definitely forgot to snap photos of some of the steps.  So if there is anything you’d like to see next time around please let me know…. I’ll be making the next set of 12 screens very soon.