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Joe Samalin
info@nihonsantools.com

Jumping right in today folks! A lot of fun stuff to share, so buckle up and come along for the ride!

Nihonsan Tools and Hardware

• Our new instructor Nolan Hatfield of Studio Noha has two new classes coming up in May! Registration will be up within the next week, and the classes are a 2-day class making a beautiful Japanese wood and shoji paper lantern, and a 1-day class making a Hinoki bathing bench. Meet Nolan and hear more about the classes this Thursday at the meetup. 
• More new classes! Kintsugi instructor Makomako is joining Nihonsan to lead a series of hands-on workshops on repairing ceramics using Japanese lacquer and gold dust. Registration will be up within the week.
• New tools in the shop! We ordered a handful of incredibly accurate 150 mm precision steel squares from Shinwa. They are simple and straightforward squares, solidly built from S50C carbon tool steel and are very, very accurate. We also finally have Japanese wood screws in stock! These uniquely designed screws can be used with NO pilot holes and rarely if ever split wood. Very cool and we are selling them by the box in a variety of lengths.

Maine Japanese Woodworking Festival

Registration for this years Maine Japanese Woodworking Festival is now open! If you haven't attended before, you have to check it out. If you have been before, not like this you haven't! Expanded from 2 to 4 days, this will be a jam-packed event with a ton of building, laughing, learning, and more. Truly a fun time hosted by the incredible folks at Never Stop Building! Holler at us if you might want to carpool!

—Joe

Will O'Connor
will@makegoodwood.com

A few things coming up in the next couple months that I wanted to draw your attention to. With all the craziness and turmoil in the world, it's a perfect moment to go deeper with your woodworking practice. For me, grabbing a chisel or Kanna, is an opportunity raise that sharp, though tiny, weapon against the forces of entropy and apathy, both inside and outside. When I'm patient, the work can become like mediation.

If you haven't yet, but are considering taking the plunge into the Japanese toolset—or know someone who would be—the "Build Your Toolbox" is the perfect stepping off point for a home-based hobby. The sessions have been filling quickly, but the upcoming session running on two Wednesdays, March 26th & April 2nd, currently has only one person enrolled. For the unfamiliar, "Build Your Toolbox" is a class I designed for all skill-levels as a soup-to-nuts introduction to hand tool woodworking with Japanese tools. Everybody buys their own tools, learns how to setup, sharpen and use them, and gets started on their toolbox, all while building a metaphorical toolbox between their ears.

For folks who have already started on their journey, I also have a few more-focused classes in joinery and project design. These evening sessions are meant to build on basic skills and support your at-home woodworking practice, but in a format that might fit more easily into your schedule. If you're thinking of a project and/or not sure what to do next, these sessions might be a perfect next step. I'll be adding more sessions later in the week, but as of right now, the Mortise & Tenon class on Tuesday March 25th only has one person enrolled.

If you'd like to learn more, here's a link to all my current offerings: makegoodwood.com/classes. Please reach out If you have questions or would like to join up for a future session.

—Will

This issue we're featuring a contribution written by one of our community members, David Klinke, the woodworker and blogger behind dkdesignwv.com. David's a professor of chemical and biomedical engineering and a fairly accomplished in his spare time. (Ask him about is recently completed sink vanity!)

If you have a story you'd like to share in the newsletter, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at will@makegoodwood.com. Enjoy! 

David Klinke
djklinke@icloud.com

So you’ve taken a kanna introduction class and excited about the potential. Though, first you have to admit that you have a kanna problem: what is your path forward to broaden incorporating Japanese hand planes into your woodworking processes?

If you are more reliant on hand planes than machines, the coarse-medium-fine paradigm is a helpful approach to tailor your hand planes to different tasks required to convert rough timber into finished furniture parts. In short, you create a posse of Japanese hand planes set up to do different tasks.

The next question is how do you populate this posse? Do you purchase all new or take an alternative path? The approach that I’m going to advocate for here is to enter the used kanna market and rehab an older hand plane to bring it into the fold. Ultimately the kanna on the used market were put on the shelf for a reason - possibly the retirement of the carpenter or a lapse in maintenance that made the plane difficult to use.

In rehabbing used planes, it requires an eye for identifying a professional-level tool and understanding what makes them work well in order to diagnose what is going wrong with the rehab one. I’ve written in more detail about the things that you should consider when rehabbing an old kanna. Here I’m going to walk though a case study.

There are multiple on-line sources for used kanna, including eBay and Yahoo!-Japan. Looking at this ad on Yahoo!-Japan (above), I saw indications of a professional-level tool, including remnants of a tsutsumi mouth ledge, a dai stamped with a dai-maker’s stamp, a laminated chipbreaker held in place by a high quality pin (i.e., not a nail), and black flecks observed in the jigane suggest a high quality blade. I won the auction, as I was the only bidder, and waited for it to arrive. When it arrived, the reason for this kanna being placed on the shelf was quite obvious (below).

It seems that the previous owner had a bias while sharpening the blade. It resulted in the cutting edge becoming extremely skewed. The owner tried to compensate by widening the blade groove in the dai. Ultimately continuing down this path was too much work. Instead of correcting the angle of the cutting edge, which may take quite a long time when done by hand, it was put on the shelf.

To rehab the plane, I focused on two things: restoring a correct cutting edge on the blade and modifying the dai to better support a correctly oriented blade.

In restoring the cutting edge, I struck a line with permanent marker and then removed the bulk of the metal with a hand-crank grinder, as to not lose the temper. The bevel was restored to 27 degrees using a modified eclipse-style sharpening jig. With the correct bevel, I trimmed back the mimi and performed ura-dashi to restore the blade to a state of readiness for action.

The dai modifications involved gluing in a shim to narrow the blade groove in the dai and removing what remained of the tsutsumi. I opted for starting with dai modifications instead of cutting a new dai because it seems that there still was good thickness of the dai and the chipbreaker pin was well-placed to provide excellent support for the chipbreaker.

These modifications were sufficient to restore the kanna to working order. Normal strategies learned in the intro class to maintain the kanna in a usable state could then be employed going forward.

Hopefully, this kanna will become a welcome addition to someones kanna posse and provide many more years of service.

—David