White Oak Shoji Cabinet – Dovetail Joinery

Once the design for this furniture project was decided, I ordered up a massive pile of nara (Japanese white oak) and started making parts. The first order of business was to rough mill and glue up all the panels that would become the top, bottom, sides and inner partitions. I also rough milled all the door and back parts as well. Below is one stack of parts including the sides and inner partitions, which I stacked and stickered to allow airflow throughout the panels. Wood is a finicky material, and it’s constantly shifting and moving with changes in humidity. If you stack your boards and only one side is exposed to open air, it’s likely to loose or gain more moisture on the exposed side, resulting in a warped surface. Stickering allows air to freely flow around the whole piece of wood, keeping changes in humidity and wood movement more balanced.

After the panels had some time to settle I ran everything through the planer one more time to bring the parts closer to the final thickness. I left all the parts just a hair oversize, to account for the material I would remove when handplaning.

Before starting on the dovetails, I handplaned the inside of the main panels of the cabinet. Planing after cutting dovetails removes material in such a way that the dovetails will become looser in their fit, so it’s helpful to plane the wood ahead of time. In this case I did a round of planing before cutting the dovetails followed by a light finish planing after, to remove the dovetail layout marks.

Tapered sliding dovetail joints

The first bit of joinery to cut were tapered sliding dovetails for joining the three inner partitions to the top and bottom of the cabinet. The location for each joint is circled below. When choosing what type of joint to use for these locations I thought a lot about the vertical weight that would be pulling on these joints. This is a really big and heavy cabinet and I didn’t want to have any risk of these partitions separating from the top and bottom over time. The shape of the sliding dovetail essentially prevents that possibility from ever happening, and locks the top, bottom and partitions together.

I started the sliding dovetails by cutting the female half of each joint using a simple router jig. The jig guides the router leaving a tapered cut of about 3mm over 1 meter of length.

Here are the top and bottom halves of the cabinet with the completed dovetail slots.

Next I moved on to cutting the male end of the sliding dovetails. I used the same jig to cut a matching taper.

Here’s a test fit of one of the joints. I adjusted the fit of each dovetail to allow the partitions to slide into the top and bottom panels loosely until the last few inches or so. For the final assembly I used clamps and some light pounding to drive the panels the rest of the way, making for a really snug connection.

Through Dovetails

After adjusting the fit of the sliding dovetails, I moved on the the corners of the cabinet. As I explained in the previous post I chose to use through dovetails on the corners of the cabinet for their strength and durability. Since I would be shipping this cabinet on a rough journey overseas and into a much drier climate, I wanted to use joinery that would hold together really well, and there aren’t many joints much better than through dovetails.

After laying out the tails, I began cutting out the joints.

With the tails complete, I started to work on the pins. After sawing along my layout lines I used a trimmer to remove the waste. To give the trimmer a solid base I clamped a couple of pieces of hinoki on each side of the panel. After routing I cleaned up the pins with a chisel.

Below are the completed pins. At this stage you can also see the many grooves that I cut for the sliding doors and the back of the cabinet.

Here are the completed sides, partitions and ship-lap boards for the back of the cabinet; all ready to be finish planed.

Here you can see the depth that comes out of the wood after finish planing. The wood really starts to take on a nice sheen.

With the main joinery cut, and all the parts finish planed I started assembling the cabinet beginning with the partitions.

With the partitions set, I could then assemble the sides panels with the through-dovetail joinery.

Up next I’ve got some shots from making the shoji doors as well as images of the completed cabinet.

Thanks for reading,

-Jon