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White Oak Shoji Cabinet – Doors

shoji cabinet doors installed

With the dovetail joinery wrapped up and the case assembled, I started to work on the 8 doors. After milling the door frame stock to size I began to layout the mortise and tenon joints. I used the set of marking gauges below for the joinery layout. I was introduced to ball pen marking gauges by the guys that I work with. They’re incredibly easy to use tools , and the ball pen ink line is much easier to see than pencil.

ball pen kebiki

With the layout complete I used a mortiser to cut out all the mortises.

shoji cabinet door mortises

Below are the roughed out tenons. I used a sliding table saw for the cross cuts and a tenon cutting table saw for the rip cuts. The tenon saw is an incredible tool that I have only seen in Japan, but I wish they were available around the world. This saw make it ridiculously easy to cut accurate tenons, and I find it far more comfortable to use than jigs commonly used with a standard table saw. (A buddy of mine made his own, if you’re interested check out Never Stop Building’s Youtube channel)

shoji cabinet door tenons

Here’s a quick clip of the tenon saw in action on another project.

After doing the machine work, I did a little hand work using some chisels to clean up the tenons and shoulder cuts.

trimming the door tenons

Here are the completed tenons after cleanup with hand tools.

finished stack of door parts

The joints between the rails and stiles of the door frames involved a tricky bit of cutting. A chamfer (beveled edge) is run around the inner edge of the frame making for a tricky intersection where the rail and stile meet. There are a few different ways to deal with this kind of situation, but in this case I used something called a jaguchi joint. This is a joint commonly seen on traditional shoji screens. The joint consists of a little bird’s beak that sticks out from the end of the tenoned piece, and matches the shape of the chamfer on the mating piece. When the two pieces go together it makes for a really clean intersection.

Jaguchi joint drawing

Here’s a shot of the jaguchi joint assembled. The bird’s beak piece cleanly mates to the chamfer, making for a clean transition from one piece to the other.

assembled jaguchi door joinery
shoji cabinet jaguchi door joinery

The last parts to fabricate for the doors were the kumiko lattices. It was a really simple construction of single vertical and horizontal pieces joined together with a half-lap joint. The ends of the kumiko have small tenons to join the door frames.

shoji cabinet kumiko

Before gluing up the doors I hand planed all the parts. Hand planing needs to happen before assembly. There’s really no good way to do it after the fact. Which means that once the parts are planed, and you start assembling and gluing parts together, it’s really important to keep the parts clean and avoid messy glue situations.

Planing white oak with HSS kanna

Here’s one of the doors during glue up.

shoji cabinet door assembly

And a stack of 4 glued up doors.

shoji cabinet completed doors

With the doors assembled I started to test their fit in the cabinet itself. It’s always satisfying to see the doors go in, and to see the cabinet start to take shape.

shoji cabinet doors installed
shoji cabinet door test fitting

One final detail was to install wood pulls. I really don’t care for using exotic woods, but my friend had a box of ebony pulls that he got from a door shop that had closed down. They had been sitting around and weren’t getting used, so he offered them to me for this project. In the end I really like how they look. The black ebony contrasts nicely with the white oak.

Shoji cabinet door pulls

The final step for the doors was to oil them and apply the paper. The client choose a handmade paper called Cloud Dragon, with lots of swirling fibers throughout. I cut the paper to size and then glued it to the frame and kumiko lattice with a water-based glue, making it easy to remove and repair in the future.

shoji cabinet cloud dragon washi paper

That’s about it for the doors. I think in the next post I’ll share the final construction details and photos of the finished cabinet. Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year everyone!

-Jon

Gus

「White Oak Shoji Cabinet – Doors」への14件のフィードバック

  1. Wow that chamfered edge joint is brilliantly simple and beautiful! Amazing work Jon and happy new year!

  2. hello! I really appreciate the time you put in to making these posts and sharing your knowledge, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it! Quick question, what type of pen do you se for the marking gauges? I have tried to use pen in my marking gauges befor and they just seem to not work very well for me. Thank you again.

    1. I use either Zebra or Mitsubishi basic pen refills for the marking gauges. Basically the old school type of refill with a simple metal piece at the pen end and a plastic tube with the ink. Where the metal piece is inserted into the plastic tube the tube flares out. I drill a hole into the wood marking gauge exactly the size of the plastic tube. If you insert the refill into the marking gauge from the plastic end (not the metal end) the flared out area will wedge itself into the hole and solidly hold the refill in place.

      I hope that makes sense and helps a bit.

      -Jon

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