White Oak Shoji Cabinet – Doors

With the dovetail joinery wrapped up and the case assembled, I started to work on the 8 doors. After milling the door frame stock to size I began to layout the mortise and tenon joints. I used the set of marking gauges below for the joinery layout. I was introduced to ball pen marking gauges by the guys that I work with. They’re incredibly easy to use tools , and the ball pen ink line is much easier to see than pencil.

With the layout complete I used a mortiser to cut out all the mortises.

Below are the roughed out tenons. I used a sliding table saw for the cross cuts and a tenon cutting table saw for the rip cuts. The tenon saw is an incredible tool that I have only seen in Japan, but I wish they were available around the world. This saw make it ridiculously easy to cut accurate tenons, and I find it far more comfortable to use than jigs commonly used with a standard table saw. (A buddy of mine made his own, if you’re interested check out Never Stop Building’s Youtube channel)

Here’s a quick clip of the tenon saw in action on another project.

After doing the machine work, I did a little hand work using some chisels to clean up the tenons and shoulder cuts.

Here are the completed tenons after cleanup with hand tools.

The joints between the rails and stiles of the door frames involved a tricky bit of cutting. A chamfer (beveled edge) is run around the inner edge of the frame making for a tricky intersection where the rail and stile meet. There are a few different ways to deal with this kind of situation, but in this case I used something called a jaguchi joint. This is a joint commonly seen on traditional shoji screens. The joint consists of a little bird’s beak that sticks out from the end of the tenoned piece, and matches the shape of the chamfer on the mating piece. When the two pieces go together it makes for a really clean intersection.

Here’s a shot of the jaguchi joint assembled. The bird’s beak piece cleanly mates to the chamfer, making for a clean transition from one piece to the other.

The last parts to fabricate for the doors were the kumiko lattices. It was a really simple construction of single vertical and horizontal pieces joined together with a half-lap joint. The ends of the kumiko have small tenons to join the door frames.

Before gluing up the doors I hand planed all the parts. Hand planing needs to happen before assembly. There’s really no good way to do it after the fact. Which means that once the parts are planed, and you start assembling and gluing parts together, it’s really important to keep the parts clean and avoid messy glue situations.

Here’s one of the doors during glue up.

And a stack of 4 glued up doors.

With the doors assembled I started to test their fit in the cabinet itself. It’s always satisfying to see the doors go in, and to see the cabinet start to take shape.

One final detail was to install wood pulls. I really don’t care for using exotic woods, but my friend had a box of ebony pulls that he got from a door shop that had closed down. They had been sitting around and weren’t getting used, so he offered them to me for this project. In the end I really like how they look. The black ebony contrasts nicely with the white oak.

The final step for the doors was to oil them and apply the paper. The client choose a handmade paper called Cloud Dragon, with lots of swirling fibers throughout. I cut the paper to size and then glued it to the frame and kumiko lattice with a water-based glue, making it easy to remove and repair in the future.

That’s about it for the doors. I think in the next post I’ll share the final construction details and photos of the finished cabinet. Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year everyone!

-Jon