Spring semester starts + stools

A good week. I started back up at Laney and made some progress on my stool project.

As of yesterday, I’m officially back at Laney Community College for another semester of Japanese joinery. No better way to spend a Saturday.

This semester we are building small tansu (cabinets). Our teacher has defined a general form; we will each determine our own design within those constraints.

The plan is to build the cabinet with slab construction (full panels of wood joined together), as opposed to frame and panel (a frame around the four sides, grooved to accept a floating panel). Slab construction will be easier: no grooves, no resawing thin panels.

More on the difference between the two approaches in this excerpt from Christian Becksvoort’s Shaker Inspiration.

I don’t have a clear vision for my cabinet yet. But I do have some fragments of intention and inspiration:

I want to use a tapered sliding dovetail joint to attach the top to the sides. I have wanted to learn how to make one for a while, as it comes in handy for attaching tabletops etc.

I also imagine a door made of California Claro walnut. I have a bunch of “normal” (Eastern black) walnut available due to some poorly planned buying for a separate project. So I plan to build the majority of the cabinet from what I have left over but am toying with trying some of this beautiful stuff for a door.

Next up in the inspiration files: Nick Sugihara’s mail cabinet doors. The perforated dot grid holes have been in the back of my mind since I first saw them. It reminds me of a locker or industrial storage. I do not know if the airflow is functional in this cabinet, but on a purely aesthetic level the grid compels me. Maybe it’s something about the order amidst the chaos (good thing) of wood grain.

And finally: Some sort of bright blue industrial feeling cabinet pull. Like the grid, I like the way a sort of harsh and perfect machine-made shape interacts with wood. It’s kinda like how the sky is more beautiful when there are a few clouds, not just pure blue…contrast jolts the mind into awareness that it’s perceiving something.

Much more to come on the cabinet project. Excited to use this ‘stack as a place to record the project as it unfolds over the course of the semester.

I am making three counter-height stools for some friends. It has been a bit of a “one step forward two steps back” situation as far as progress has been concerned, mostly as a result of lazy planning and design on my part.

But I’ve finally turned a corner and feel like the sailing will be smooth(er) from here on out. Or maybe I’ll discover a fatal flaw next week and have to start over, who knows!!! But for now, feeling optimistic as I start to see the first stool take shape.

Finishing all three of the stools is going to take me a while. Each will have 16 mortise and tenons, all of which I will do by hand. I did a few test mortises with a drill press to get out the majority of the material and then clean up with a chisel but it ended up feeling like more trouble than it was worth to get everything set up.

Also I just kind of enjoy chopping mortises, especially now that I have a mortise chisel. It feels like I’ve gotten a bit faster and better with each successive one so far, so I’m excited to see how my efficiency evolves after cutting out almost 50 of them.

At some point in my Laney classes we learned about using story sticks. Basically, you measure and mark all of the relevant dimensions on a piece of scrap wood and then use it to mark your pieces. This is an alternative to measuring every single piece in the project on its own. When we learned about story sticks, I dutifully made one but the concept didn’t really click for me at all (…academic striver nerd habits die hard).

But story sticks popped back into my head as I contemplated the best way to get each of these stools to turn out identically without losing my mind. I measured once on my story stick and now I can just mark everything off of that and get identical results. The concept has clicked!

I feel very grateful for the solace woodworking provides me but it also feels insane to say anything about this week without acknowledging the backdrop of horror in our country. Never thought a Substack “note” would bring a tear to my eye but this one did when I saw it today. ‼️ Abolish ICE ‼️

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading as always.