Small Elm Table

Hi everyone

Just thought I would share this with you as it has a little Japanese feel to it.

My wife Sandra had been asking me to make a small low coffee / tea table for our lounge.

With Christmas approaching I thought it would be the perfect gift.

I had a look in my old stock of timber and found a small amount of Elm. Hard to work , but such a great looking Timber.

With no plans or drawings just a pile of wood I came up with this. J

This is the underside. Elm moves for a past time ,so needed to make sure the top could move freely.

I dovetailed the corner frame, chamfered the legs to meet on the corner. An end cleat on the end of the top boards is a good idea for Elm too.

A quick coat of the Queens favorite oil and the jobs a gooden.

 smells good too.

                             

And before you know it 10hrs later boom there it is, a kind of English Japanese looking table !

This year im going to try and cut more Japanese joints ,maybe at our meeting group days.

Andy Ryalls

Push me, pull you?

I like gauges...lots of them and to be fair, I've used lots of different sorts of  gauges.

I've used the traditional European gauge with a point, or pin which are worse than useless, especially across the grain, where a cutting gauge works far better.  I've use the more modern wheel type things...but how the hell do you know where the line is supposed to start or finish?

Not surprisingly, they rapidly got kicked into touch, but it was only by the merest chance that I happened to see that Classic Hand Tools were selling a rather inexpensive Japanese gauge which my daughter bought me for Christmas a few years ago...

...and what a revelation!

The long stock, coupled with proper knife which has around 10deg of 'toe in' meant that it was virtually impossible not to produce a decent gauge line, first time, every time.  Any cabinet 'shop will always need more than one gauge so I decided to make a couple of replicas.  Japanese White Oak wasn't available of course, so I had to 'slum' it with the English variety...but if it was good enough for the Royal Navy for the better part of the 17th and 18th century, I'm sure that the honourable Japanese wouldn't object too strongly.

My replicas were surprisingly easy to make, and although the metal work is perhaps a little 'agricultural' they do work exactly the same as the original, seen on the left in the pic. For a few hours work, I now have a couple of really accurate gauges that are every bit as good as the originals.

Hammers ( Tsuchi )

Just thought I wood put a picture of a few of my hammers please feel free to ask questions.
The one on the left I use for tapping out my blades , but you can use the genno to the far right of the photo.

Andy Ryalls

A Gift

Hi can anyone help, I would be very grateful  this was a gift from Sadatsugu Wantanabe-san.

I am trying to find out more about it.

 The bag is folded in a simple folded design.



This is the bottom side of the interesting bag ,it reminds me of grease proof paper just like Gran used for cooking.

 Shall we open it and see whats inside.

Its a piece off thick cloth with these symbols.

It has a feel of being very old.

This is a close up of one of the symbols.

And another.

And this is the third.

I will treasure this as it will always remind me of our first meeting and hopefully many more.

Ps this is also a test page for the JTSG.

 A few Benches to help the discussion of Japanese work-positions.

4 photos

The Japanese Tools Study Group Blog begins...

 

 

This was everyone present on our 3rd offical meeting, October 14th 2012.

 

From left to right we have:

Alex, Stephen, Greg, Berin (thats me!) John, Rob,

Michael, Andy (kneeling) and Harvey.

It was at this meeting over lunch that the idea of the Blog was born.