Milling the boards for the shelf was a difficult task because there was a big nasty knot going through the two halves of the resawed board that I used. The discovery of this knot marked those boards as being for the shelf; it was possible to arrange them so that it would make the piece interesting but not look weird or overwhelm the otherwise clear (but not straight) grain.

So when I jointed the two boards and glued them together, I was prepared for the possibility that I might need to start again. Fortunately, this did not turn out to be the case; it flattened well with just a smoothing plane after the glueup, and so I was optimistic about the final steps.

The general idea for fitting this shelf is with “tongue” on the side of the shelf going into the groove in the lower stretchers in the frame. However, this tongue would not be a complete tongue; it would be formed by a simple rabbet extending around four edges of the shelf, and the shelf is to hang down so that the rabbet is invisible. With this design, it will be able to float in the frame and be able to expand and contract as it pleases.

I started by marking the underside as being the rabbeted face (the pencil marks going around the edges), and scribed a line 1/4″ from the top face (slightly harder to see in this photo):

Then I got out my Stanley #78, did the requisite fooling around with its adjustments, and cut the bulk of the rabbet almost down to the scribed line:

Then I used my Taiwanese rabbet plane to finish off the cut down to the line and fine-tune the fit:

The difference between setting up and using these two planes is like night and day. The Stanley is an older version without a depth adjuster, and while holding it is more comfortable than, say, holding Kerry King’s armband, your left hand always feels like it’s in an awkward spot. The Taiwanese plane is simple to set and adjust, and its comfortable “back” (“toe” in western terms, or something) is easy to grip and provides a very nice registration surface ahead of the cut. Overall, these two planes complemented each other very well for this task.

The completed shelf looks like this when upside-down:

You can see parts of the knot in the lower left. I was lucky that this did not extend much further into the board.

To fit the corners of the shelf at the legs, I had two choices: I could chop out a little notch on each corner on the shelf and fit it around the legs, or I could extend the grooves in the stretchers into the legs and slip the shelf in as-is. I opted for the latter approach because it seemed to me to be the easiest and the best-looking.

It was quick work with a chisel, since it’s only about 1/4″ square of wood to remove. Here are two of the extended grooves:

Finally, I did a test-fit. Success:

I’ll let the front rear frames sit for another few days before I glue up the whole frame. Now I need to decide whether I will size up/flatten the top or make the drawer. Apart from finishing, they are (surprisingly) the only two things left to do on this project.

It’s fairly long, maybe about 9″ or so. But that’s not the first thing you notice about it–the lack of a handle is. They typically aren’t used without mallets.

These things are struck with a long, rectangular mallet made of a single piece of wood. They are somewhere around 2x2x9″, with one end rounded so that it’s comfortable. Due to the small hard area that they hit, the mallets quickly form concavities on their faces. So soon after you start using a new mallet, it tends not to slip.

Although it looks cheap, this gouge was not particularly cheap. The red at the end means that it’s made with “quality steel,” and I think the cost was about $8. I’ve tried it out and it works fine, but I think I’d prefer to make an appropriate mallet before doing too much with it.

The plane below is a little block-esque plane made by “Hsieh Hsing:”

This one actually came with packaging, which advertised it as “Japanese-style,” despite the fact that it’s no different than any Taiwanese plane I’ve seen. It’s short (maybe about 4″ long), and has a thick, quality blade that was very easy to flatten. Its throat is rather wide open, which lends it to uses of more rough block plane, but it does a good job and I can’t complain about that.

The final Taiwanese tool I’ll describe is a little special due to the person who gave it to me. One of the reasons for this whole trip was to meet my future inlaws, and as scary as that may sound, it turns out that they were all really great. One uncle in particular is also interested in building stuff, so I showed him this blog and we talked a bit on the subject. He’s also the one who took me to the store where I got most of these tools; it would have been difficult to find without him. And finally, he gave me this little smoothing plane:

Thanks, Uncle!

I think I’m finally mostly caught up with updates from the trip, so it’s time to get focused back on my various projects; I’ve already got some stuff started and can’t wait to get back to business on that. I’ll have some updates shortly. In the meantime, enjoy this view from Mugumuyu near Hualien (those rocks are marble):

The body is pretty clearly some sort of white oak, the only such example that I picked up. The blade is laminated and decently thick. This was one of the more expensive tools that I got; I think the cost was about $15.

The big characters on the blade and on the red part of the sticker comprise the brand name. On the rest of the sticker, it says something like, “very good quality,” and it seems to hold true. Everything mates perfectly, the mouth is tight, and it produces good, smooth shavings. I managed to do some panel-raising with it.

[edit: This seems to be a Taiwanese version of the mado-waku-shakuri-kanna that Toshio Odate mentions on page 106 of his Japanese Woodworking Tools book.]

Next up is this wooden spokeshave:

This is a little larger than most western wooden shaves (maybe about 60% larger), and it was not their biggest model, which was enormous. The “37″ is the production number (apparently out of a run of 100). The blade is hand-forged and decently easy to hone; you can straddle a 2.5″ stone with it. It works well. Cost was about $8.

Next up is a rounding plane. We’ve seen a bunch of similar tools under the brand Mujingfang, but this Taiwanese version uses a metal plate rather than the wooden wedge found in most of the others (I didn’t see a single wooden wedge in any Taiwanese-made plane while I was there):

The size is printed on the top near the toe. As with all of the other tools I bought, it works spendidly. I think the cost was about $10.

[Edit: The place where I got these tools is JCwoodworking. They're at Section 1, ZhongQing North Rd, 100, Taipei (台北市重慶北路1段100號). The Google maps location is currently a block off; it's about one block north, just south of the circle on the east side of the road. The "about us" map on their web site has a better map.]

So switching away from tools, let’s look at some tree stuff. One of the places we went was Sitou, which is home to the Sitou Forest Recreation/Nature Education Area. It’s an experimental forest run by National Taiwan University, and you can see many different kinds of trees that they’re playing around with. They even have a California redwood or two there, which is kind of fitting, since we have a Dawn redwood in Henry Cowell Redwoods Park here.

In any case, there are a bunch of things you can look at, and one of the most interesting is the Skywalk, a walkway on a trestle that extends from the side of a hill that goes right into the forest canopy. It’s not every day that you can just walk around the middle of a bunch of Japanese Red Cedars:

(Yes, there are birds, bugs, spiders, and all sorts of stuff up there.)

The forest is hardly old-growth, though. It was once dominated by the Formosan Cypress (Chamaecyparis formosensis), but like so many good trees, it grows slowly and is far too valuable for people to actually want to conserve in any reasonable fashion until all of the trees are gone. But there’s one cypress of note there, a giant 2800-year-old cypress considered a “sacred tree:”

Of course, the only real reason it was spared is because it is too hollow and crummy to be used for timber, so they called it “sacred” instead. Hmph. In any case, it’s pretty amazing.

First up was a trip to Sanyi Village to see the Wood Sculpture Musuem (三義木雕博物館):

Sorry about the lack of photos inside the museum. They don’t allow photos.

If you’re into sculpture or carving at all, this museum is pretty much a must-see for the island. It contains stuff from ancient times, to the Formosan aborigines, to the Han and Hakka sculptors, to contemporary pieces from their annual contest. There are also galleries containing temporary exhibitions. Make sure you get the audio tour, especially if you can’t read Chinese characters–there is an English one available. There’s quite a lot of information in the audio tour and it takes quite a while to go through it all.

There’s also a studio inside the museum where you can see and talk to a sculptor at work with traditional carving tools. I’ll try to explain this in a later post, but I think I need to do a little more research on the matter.

The village itself is full of shops containing lots and lots of pieces for sale. A lot of this consists of the garden variety happy/laughing Buddha sculptures and carved fruit (sometimes made from cypress; take off the cap and smell inside for the effect), but there are some interesting pieces as well.

By this point, you’re probably wondering if I went tool hunting during this trip. The answer to that question is, “yes,” the answer to the next question is, “quite a bit,” and here is a sampler:

This rabbet/shoulder plane was handmade in Taiwan, somewhere in the south. I’m guessing that the wood shaping was done by machine, but the finish looks handplaned, and the blades are hand-forged. The iron is laminated. I’ll have more on this plane later, when I have a chance to play with it.

And, no, Dan, I don’t know why we both posted about weird rabbet planes on the same day.