Making a twisted dovetail box

Here is another great article by John Bullar, once again featuring fantastic joinery.

These twisted dovetails (or nejiri arigata in Japanese) will give any piece an exquisite handmade look.

And not only these dovetails look great, they will handle pulling forces both sideways and lengthways.

Japanese joinery

Correy Smith, a regular at the Japanese Woodworking Forums published some great photos of his latest project - a "Quasi DownEast Chinese Tansu".

This piece features exquisite exposed joinery that take the build to a higher level of craftsmanship. The three way miter is one of my favorites on this piece.

Enjoy....

• Butternut Cabinet - joinery samples
  

Setting hoops on Japanese chisels

When you buy a brand new Japanese chisel there is some work to do before it can be used.

Like with western chisels, the back of the blade must be flattened and polished to a mirror finish and it has to be sharpened to a very fine edge.

With Japanese chisels however, the tool is not ready to be used, the hoop on the top of the handle must be permanently set.

Here's how:

• http://www2.woodcraft.com/pdf/77B66.pdf
• http://www.imcclains.com[...]JapaneseChisels.pdf
• http://japanwoodworker.[...]instructions.pdf
  

This may seem like a lot of extra work, but I guarantee you that it will be quite rewarding. There is nothing more satisfying than working with a sharp tool that is properly tuned.

Dovetail nirvana

A while back, while doing some research on dovetailed carcass construction I came across this article by John Bullar.

I kept the original link in one of my Firefox tabs but it seems that it is no longer available. *

Luckily there is the Internet Archive... pretty amazing!

I've seen some crazy dovetailed projects, but this one beats them all!

There are a total of 120 dovetails in this piece, and if that wasn't enough, every other pin is 1/3 shorter to add visual interest to the joint.

* The article is available again at it's original location.
(edited on 26-Mar-2008)

Making a wood plane from a kit

While browsing some of the woodworking videos on YouTube I came across this one from Ron Hock showing how to make a handplane from kit. The video also shows how to sharpen the blade using the ruler trick often attributed to David Charlesworth.

• Make a Plane from a HOCK Plane Kit

In the end of the video you'll also see the method used to tune a wooden handplane, with just a few taps you're good to go. Simple and effective!