Homework

When you study physics, at least in Chile, you learn by doing homework. Real difficult problems that you need to solve before next week. During one semester we (as in the group of friends studying physics) didn't sleep one night, the whole night working and talking about the homework.

It was really intense and after that, everything else seems a bit like vacations. Vacations in hell as in Graz but vacations anyway.

While reading one of these old woodworking books I found the same. Exercises they were called here. First one was to make flat one face of a piece of wood with a chisel. Second, make flat and perpendicular the next face, again with a chisel. Quite fast the book was asking you to make a handrail or a boat... or something like that, really complex exercises.

What stuck me then was the order of the exercises. First of all not the sawing, or the planing, but the chisel. And use the chisel as a plane. I have never tried doing it, flattening a board with a chisel. I should try perhaps.

Anyway, today in the night, since we have a new japanese heater. The cylindrical ones where you can put your kettle and make tea later. I guess it fits my tools. So, having solved the cold problem for today, I decided to try some joinery in my room.

The rules are: no jigs, no knife marks, no rabbet planes. So everything is done, save the squaring, with chisel and hammer.

I want to make some shoji eventually (today we took half of the kitchen's tiles off, it's looking emptier and nicer already). So why not copy Gabe and try some miter tenon joints a la Odate?

Don't look at the rabbet, that was another exercise.

I love the way rauli (Lophozonia alpina) (in my times it was a notophagus btw) cuts. Gives you really crisp surfaces and it's a pleasure to work with.

I don't know if you can see it, but I didn't cut the last part of the tenon, there where the shadow is. I could not figure it out how to do it without a drill and you cannot put a saw in that hole... plus I don't have a bottom cleaning chisel.

If I were to make this for real, I would plane the mitres' end grain with a shooting board, then the sides of the tenon also planed and only use chisels for the inner parts. Faster and more accurate. Also, knife mark the lines and plane to them.

One of my tasks for the first months here is to make a collection of japanese joints, so expect more posts like this one. Maybe we call them one night stand joints?