Posted by Dave Bull at 2:45 AM, March 19, 2012 [Permalink]
And we have our first bites into the wood! With this case construction - just as with the printmaking itself - it's fun to get the planning and prep behind us and get some wood shavings flying!
Lee-san got busy with the planer that we borrowed from my neighbour Abe-san. We found that this kiri (paulownia), although soft and 'easy' to work, is not so forgiving with the grain direction. He has to get each one entered into the machine in the proper direction, or we get grain tear-out, no matter how finely we set the cut.
After he got started I headed down to my own bench to do some carving on the embossing block for the first print, and next time I came upstairs I found that things had changed:
This guy is nothing if not inventive, and as he goes along, he is working out a system for catching as much of the sawdust and chips as possible. (There is no way we can afford a big vacuum extraction system right now ...)
We're going to be working with paulownia of four different raw thicknesses, although if I tell you that they are expressed as measurements such as 5分5厘柾, I doubt that it will mean much. We're targeting a finished thickness of 15mm, 9mm, 6mm, and 4mm for various parts of the case, and as the resawing on this stuff was done pretty finely, he only needs a few light passes through the planer to get there.
