Continued from Part 1
By the time my tools were set up and sharpened at the end of the first class, winter weather began descending on Port Jervis. Humidity dropped along with the temperature, shifting the planes' bodies by twisting and cupping their wooden blocks to the point of needing additional flattening and scraping to work well again.
The next class would cover joinery.
Yann demonstrated each joint, one step at a time. Each of his movements was efficient, fast, smooth, and calm. It was the first time I noticed the body language of all experienced craftspeople.
Before we could duplicate Yann's cuts, we had to learn to reproduce the layout of the joint on the wood using pencils. With squares and rules as guides, we drew precise lines, indicating where to cut, what to saw and to what depth.
Japanese carpenters are known for being able to join irregular pieces, like natural logs. But for our first attempts, we would be using stock with 90 degree angles. Before laying out a tenon (the male part of a simple joint that inserts into the mortise, or hole) on a long rectangular piece, students had to check the piece was square around its top, sides and bottom. And adjust it with a plane if not, shaving off fractions of a millimeter at a time. Then we would determine where the shoulder (i.e. the base) of the tenon would go. The layout for the shoulder is basically a line that wraps around the stock.
Trying to wrap a shoulder line in pencil, I laid down my sashigane (a Japanese carpenter's square) on the long part of the stick. Then I traced the other leg of the L-shaped tool. The resulting line should be perpendicular to the length of the stock, across a single side of the stick. After repeating this process three times, my last line theoretically should have connected to the start of the first line. But it was skewed to one side. I erased my lines and tried again. And again. And again.
Other students had moved on to laying out the tenon and were almost ready to start sawing. Yet my lines were still not connecting around the shoulder.
I asked for help. Yann asked, is your sashigane square? I responded, I think so, because it’s new. And it was a good one. He said that they don’t always come square. Which seemed crazy. Why wouldn’t a brand new square be square?
Unlike western style carpenter's squares — which are expected to be and stay square — a Japanese sashigane must be initially and occasionally checked for squareness and adjusted accordingly. Yann taught me how.
First, make a common straight line. Then check the sashigane by laying the inside of the longer leg to the line and using the other leg to draw a vertical line. Flip the sashigane along the long side, and align the perpendicular leg to the original vertical line you just drew. If the two vertical lines overlap, the sashigane is square. If the two vertical lines deviate, the square is off.
To make the sashigane more open or closed, hammer the inside or outside corner of the tool in order to expand the metal and push its legs more or less acutely.
(If you didn’t follow some or any of that, that’s ok, it’s not really the point of the story.)
A tool that can be adjusted to extreme accuracy with only a hammer, a pencil and piece of paper is an astounding thing in a digital world. It seems lame a new tool won’t work out of the box. But I would learn over time, all squares are tunable and all square should be checked occasionally. It was the first of many times over the next few years where skill would demonstrate its importance over tool quality.
With the sashigane fixed, I was finally drawing straight lines that were square. I was able to lay out my tenons and mortises and it was time to make chips.
The class covered several variations of M&T joints: regular, wedged, and my eventual favorite, pegged.[1]
Sawing a joint feels unnatural at first. The trick is to gently, carefully let the saw do its own thing. But every stroke is an opportunity for the saw to wander off course as it rips down the grain from the end of a stick to the shoulder of the tenon. In the worst case, the saw cuts into the work piece you want to preserve, weakening or ruining the tenons.
Saws are delicate and need tuning, but beginners argue with them unnecessarily when they just want to be listened to. I recall my initial instinct was to push the saw down hard, muscling it left and right to keep it on track. It didn't help that the saw Karl had given me had its teeth offset to one side, causing it to wander without prompting.[2]
Mortises and tenons were finished imperfectly, with many gaps. There was no time to rest and the classes got crazier from there.
The next thing we cut was a scarf joint. These joints are used to extend posts and beams across spans too long for a typical piece of lumber to reach across. Although the joint fit together, looking back at my photos from five years ago, I note large gaps between where the end grain should meet, where those parts critically need to connect firmly.
Next we learned how to build a shachi joint, which is how 4 beams intersect in a single post. This is a fundamental joint for any architectural project bigger than a shed, where multiple beams must land in the same place. (It’s easier for you to refer to the image below rather than having me describe it further.) I don’t know what to say except that someone who thought they could handle all this joinery two weeks after picking up a tool for the first time was probably feeling a little overconfident. Physical skills come slower than expected for people who grew up on the internet.
Having barely made one joint happen myself, Yann’s grace while working now seemed superhuman. I asked how we were supposed to get our joints to be perfect. He said, practice. But then added, if all your layout is accurate, you are just cutting pencil lines in half.
I asked him to clarify what he meant by that. He explained that pencil lines for joinery are sawn to leave half of the layout lines on each piece. When fit together, the two opposite halves of the pencil lines should reform the whole pencil line. This simple concept left me confused for a few minutes. I just couldn't comprehend how a human could cut a line accurately enough to split a 0.5mm pencil line without machine or computer assistance. And yet, I knew I would spend the next few years trying.
The rest of my trip to Mokuchi was fruitful, but I was faltering on a physical level. I was also maxing out on Chinese food, which if you know me, does not happen easily. The final class of my 3 week stay was on shoji making, and I did not complete the project. The weather became colder and my body complained, particularly my hands.
Before long, I left for home with a box full of new tools, rickety joints, and a gift from Yann—a Japanese hand made brush meant to clear chips from my work surfaces before they could mar my work pieces. I also brought with me the feeling of wood joining with wood.
Upon returning to reality, I wanted to continue this feeling of joining wood together. I made a present for my partner, Jennifer. It was a box of some generic mahogany, pre flattened and squared from the hardware store and it broke because the joinery was out of proportion for the strength of the material, joints were inaccurately cut and the stock had lost flatness as it dried sitting on the store shelf. I think we still have it somewhere, hiding in a pile of legos.
I asked Yann’s apprentice at the time, Paul, what I should do. He advised me to just sharpen and cut the most basic projects and joints over and over again. So I sharpened. And built simple things. Things like saw horses to work on, all draw bored. And small cabinets. Each one slightly better than the next.
Learning on your own is so slow and full of setbacks.[3] For example, it took me a full year to realize the way I was flattening my sharpening stones was leaving them domed. But there is power in practicing what you do know.
I kept training with teachers when I could. And started doing some carpentry on my own house, focusing on sliding doors and cabinets and other minor finish work like Japanese hardware that was shaped in an irregular way, requiring hand tools install. When I did trim work next to carpenters who sanded, my planed finishes akwardly glowed. We needed to lightly brush this work with 600 grit sandpaper to allow it to take finishes better, and match.
Towards the end of construction, I expanded the garage and transformed it into a wood shop, equipped with all the hand tools and machines I could need to build anything from lamps to light architectural scale work.
I will tell you about all this some other time.
A few months ago, I went out to Yann's shop to study and prototype a new timber framing class. This type of class had never been taught in America because this level of information isn't necessary for most non-professionals. Based on a six post structure, it involved hip rafter theory, shachi joints, M&T, dovetails, and centerline layouts. There was lots of additional education on layout, wood selection and orientation — all to ensure the most attractive and most practical sides of the timbers were facing the right direction for aesthetic and structural concerns.
After thinking so hard about the design of a small frame for the first few days, we let off some steam by practicing some of the classic joints we would be using in the frame. By now, the fundamentals of sawing and paring had moved out of the thinking mind and into my body's memory, so I could focus a bit more on approaching my final layout lines with more speed without sacrificing care.
As I began sawing, Yann offered a small piece of advice in the form of a procedural technique. The resulting joint was instantly recognizable as the best I’d ever cut. Checking it, it was square, clean, flat and tolerances were within a few thousandths of an inch in thickness when checked with a 4” Mitutoyo digital caliper—one of my favorite tools, albeit not a carpenter’s tool.[4] Yann looked the joint over, paused to think about what he wanted to say, and without much ceremony said, "ok," before moving on to check other joints.
Last week I arrived in Japan to study for a month with a chair and sashimono craftsman named Tak Yoshino at a school near Mt Fuji.
The program is open to people with zero experience with tools and woodworking, so I initially requested permission to skip ahead of the first week of lessons. I am discovering that the more accurate, sensitive and delicate context of furniture makes everything feel difficult again. Every day is long, hard and rewarding. We wake up in the quarters above the shop, and sharpen deep into the night.
Next time I write, I will tell you what I am seeing and feeling here.
Footnotes
- I love these pegged M&T joints. The peg is offset slightly, more or less depending on the scale or wood hardness, which means the peg should draw the joint tighter as it's driven in. It takes a bit more skill to execute than the other joints and looks all the more beautiful for it. Invisible joinery is humble and amazing, but who could blame any young joiner from wanting to show-boat a little bit in a world dominated by screws, glue and automatic joining machines?
- The teeth of my saw from Karl were likely crushed from being stacked in a pile of tools at some point.
- During COVID, I watched at least 3 other white collar hobby woodworkers try to build a complex bench before being sharp, knowing how to cut joints, or saw straight. They all learned on YouTube. One guy I know stuck a giant piece of oak into a planer, not realizing you have to take off a layer at a time, destroying the machine instantly by setting it to the final intended depth on the first pass. Another ended up screwing his bench together and quitting.
- I once heard a story of an old, Kyoto-trained carpenter in California, who threw a Mitutoyo caliper across the room when a junior brought it to work.
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