Planing and japanese books

[antonello]

Dear Friends

Certainly my English is not good at all so I’d like to have your advice in the following matter.

When reading the book “The complete Japanese joinery” (Hartley&Marks Publ.) I did find the following two pages and underlined the phrase in red as, to my opinion, as I did understood , it doesn’t match with the Figures 5.9 and 5.10:

Am I that I’m wrong or there’s a bit of confusion in the book between text and figures?

Many thanks for your aid.

Cheers

Antonello

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Another way of depicting what the author is describing is shown in the attached sketch. To determine if you need to 'run up the hill' or 'roll down the valley' you need to look at the end grain to work out which way the cup needs to face before planing, ie, cup up (valley), or cup down (hill). Making this assessment before planing is useful on the tangentially sawn faces, but it's not infallible as the grain can reverse and do other odd things. Slainte.

Edit mode. PS. Something about the description you scanned and posted bothered me, so I went and had another wee look.

The first bit that niggled was the vagueness of the description, including all those bracketed translations that make it hard for the reader to follow the text.

Secondly, at least one of the labels is incorrect. Figure 5.8 indicates the pith is at the edge of a board. That edge is neither the pith nor on the pith facing side of the cut board. The pith is at the very centre of the log, as we all know of course.

Lastly, I can't for the life of me see any benefit in trying to make life confusing for non-Japanese speaking woodworkers by describing the pith side of a tangentially cut board as the "back" face and the bark side of the same board the "front" face.

On the other hand, maybe I'm just being picky and pedantic, and I'm wet all over, ha, ha.

 

[antonello]

Many many thanks for the explanation.

I think those two pages are terribly confusing......certainly, the translation from the Japanese into English of a woodworking book is not the most easy thing to do in the life, I suppose, but a book should be explanatory and not puzzling....

Beautiful the figure you posted, did you make it?

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Beautiful the figure you posted, did you make it?

Yes, that's one of my doodles. Glad it helped.

Incidentally, I found, like you, that figures 5.9 and 5.10 in the text you posted were rather confusing and graphically rather uninformative. However, others might find them perfectly understandable. We are all different. Slainte.

 

[Jacob]

Richard's drawings contain all the information you need as far as I can see, but much more concisely than the japanese book.
There is a big tendency in woodwork to mystify things especially with japanese stuff like the text above and things like ridiculously thin saws which work backwards and other esoteric oddities.
This is all very well but at the same time it devalues our own rich and varied traditions, which I think is a great pity. They don't know or do anything much which we don't know or do just as well, if not better.

However if using softwood the front and back of the boards is very distinctive so these terms are useful, though I tend to think of them as inner (pith side) and outer (usually the best face)