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Making Kumiko with Pin Stop and Hikouki Kanna

woven kumiko reversed

Making Kumiko Thinner

I was recently working on a couple of projects where I wanted to use extra thin kumiko strips.  My goal was to make strips around 2mm thick.  I started the process using the method I described in the previous blog post, but when I started hand planing the strips I soon realized that the strips were now so thin and flexible that they were being pulled up into the blade even after I had reached the set thickness.  The issue got me thinking more about using a hikouki kanna and a different method of holding the strips that keeps them in tension rather than pushing them against a stop.  By holding them in tension you can avoid the issue of thin strips buckling and flexing which can happen when using an end stop.

A simple method of holding the strips in tension is to use sharp pins, inserted into the end of the planing beam, that dig into the kumiko and hold it in place.  Kumiko strips are placed over the pins and tapped down with a hammer. Its incredibly important to make sure the pins are short enough that they don’t get swiped by the plane when thicknessing.

For my stop I used nails that have been tapped into a removable piece of wood, then clipped nice and short.  A bit of trial and error with this method led me to file the pins to sharp points and slightly angle them away from the direction I was planing.  Angling the pins helps the kumiko to stay locked onto the pins and held down to the planing beam as the kumiko strips are put in tension while planing; in this way they act more like hooks.

Pin Stop

 

Pin Stop Kumiko Attached

I started using the pin stop along with my usual smoothing plane with a couple strips of wood (about 2 mm thick) double-stick taped to the sole.  The pin stop eliminated any buckling and flexing, but I was still having problems with the strips ending up thinner than I wanted.  I think the problem is that with really thin kumiko, even though the material is held in tension, there is still enough flexibility that once the blade engages it has a tendency to pull the strip up into the blade when cutting.

This is where the hikouki kanna comes in.  This plane has a build in spring-loaded bar that pushed the kumiko down onto the planing beam, effectively eliminating the above problem.  I had never used one of these planes before, but I took a gamble that it might solve my problem, and I set about making one.  It happened to be the first dai (wood body of the Japanese plane) that I’ve ever cut… I had a few mistakes, but in the end had a usable plane.

Here is the result, a hikouki kanna complete with a spring-loaded pressure bar and removable side tracks.

Hikouki Kanna

 

Here are the removable side tracks.  These extend beyond the surface of the plane sole by a bit over 2mm, but can be made to accommodate any kumiko thickness.

bottom of hikouki kanna

hikouki kanna pressure bar

hikouki kanna spring

 

 

Here you can see how much the pressure bar extends beyond the surface of the sole of the plane.

hikouki kanna pressure bar gap

 

And when it’s depressed….

hikouki kanna

 

 

And turns out it works!  And it works pretty well.  I was able to plane my kumiko strips down to just over 2mm with a very consistent thickness.  The pressure bar seemed to serve it’s purpose and worked well to prevent the kumiko from pulling up into the blade.

hikouki kanna shaving

 

I think I’ll use this setup, the pin stop and hikouki kanna, for most of my kumiko work from now on.  It’s much more versatile, by not having to cut a groove in a planing beam for every different kumiko thickness.  Instead you just make different side tracks that attach to the plane, like these made for 1/8″ kumiko…

hikouki kanna side tracks

 

And the result and what all this was for…. a nice consistent stack of strips.

2 mm kumiko and chisel

 

All for some goma gara pattern coasters made as a thank you for some generous folks I met on a recent trip to Japan.

goma gara kumiko pattern coasters

 

And also for some new experiments…..

woven kumiko

 

Thanks for visiting

 

 

10 thoughts on “Making Kumiko with Pin Stop and Hikouki Kanna”

  1. Very cool, so have you tried the hikouki kanna on your original setup w/stop using the kanna without thickness stops installed? Wondering how it stacks up to pin/ tension method

    1. Good question. Without thickness stops attached the hikouki kanna would work essentially the same as a regular kanna, so I haven’t tried using it in that way. Even though there is the pressure bar installed when it is fully depressed it is flush with the bottom surface of the plane, so if you used it without the thickness stops there would be nothing preventing you from planing too much.

      1. Ok I se the pic better, the stops are dadoed into the plane body, didn’t see that before…I was really thinking the pressure bar wasn’t the whole width of the plane body…if it wasn’t then you maybe could use a thickness if sled more like Des Kings books show and maybe the bar would put pressure on the kumiko strip and allow you to plane down to say 1.5 mm or so….cutting strip of consistent thickness is giving me fits…you know what happens on machine cut joints that aren’t scaled to blade kerf…..😣thanks for your input

  2. het is erg jammer dat de vertaling van Engels naar het Nederlands complete wartaal wordt en dus niet te begrijpen waarover het gaat.

  3. Thanks for posting this. Very interesting to read of your success. I’m thinking to do the same. Can you tell me the source for your springs?

    On a different thought, did you try tuning the bottom of a kanna to have a deeper or a shallower relief between the touch points ahead of the blade? I read of that somewhere with the objective to get more or less compression of the wood before the blade. Can’t remember which approach is for hard woods and which for soft.

    I just took a moment to look at Odate’s book. He has a diagram of an hikouki kanna but wrote that he never used one, which is curious as he apprenticed and worked at making kumiko and shoji.

    1. I don’t remember exactly where I purchased the springs, but they are fairly commonly available. They are a type of spring used for window screens, and if you google around they should come up pretty easily.

      I typically don’t take too much relief out of my kanna when tuning. Almost everything that I end up handplaning has already been milled flat so there is no need for a deeper relief, which is usually used on rough wood. For hardwoods or softwoods I use the same level of relief.

      Odate’s book is fantastic. I remember reading the part where he says that he learned to plane kumiko to the desired thickness just with his intuition. It may be possible but I’m not at that level of skill yet 🙂

  4. They also look like the springs used in metal photo frames to keep the matt board and glass pressed firmly against the front inside edge of the frame. I’ll bet if you went to a frame shop, or the frame shop in a Michael’s and asked for some they would gladly give you a few.

  5. Jon hi, thank you for sharing your knowlege 🙂 I’m converting my old kanna to a hikouki kanna, but instead of making fixed size rails i want to make adjustable ones. Tha main reason is that i live in region with a lot of humidity changes almost in every season so the rails will change their dimensions anyway. Another reason is that i don’t want to cut a rabbets in kanna. So my thought was to put the rails on the sides of kanna body much like in Bridge City planes:
    https://bridgecitytools.com/products/hp-8-mini-block-plane
    What do you think? Should it work as well asthe dedicated rabbeted rails?
    Thank you

    1. Hi Pavel,

      Thanks for the comment. I think you’re adjustable rails idea makes a lot of sense, and looks like it should work well if you do something similar to the Bridge City plane. I’d love to see how it turns out when you finish the plane.
      -Jon

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