I got wood, how ’bout you?

So I completed my first Asa No Ha Kumiko panel. It’s in the image below.

This took me several hours to make because:

• It’s my first attempt at something like this
• I’m a bonehead

It’s made of basswood which is pretty soft, and cuts easily with various methods.

It all began with an ~8ft board of basswood, approximately 8″ wide by 15/16″ thick. I started by cutting off a piece about 10″ long, and then using my table saw to split it in half along the face (so I’d have 2 pieces, about a half-inch thick, by 10″ long by 8″ wide).

After this procedure (which the woodworkers call ‘re-sawing’) I used a homemade jig to cut the board into 1/8″ (~3mm) strips.

The strips fit nicely into the Kumiko block jigs (which I purchased, as opposed to making myself). That allows me to use my super-sharp chisels to trim the ends of the small strips at specific angles, so they all fit together into the pattern in the pic above.

This whole process is based on patience and accuracy. If you aren’t patient, you might as well forget trying to do this, because it takes a MINUTE to get accustomed to this kind of tedious work

If you aren’t accurate in the beginning when you create the square shaped grid to fit the beveled pieces into, the squares will be all wonky and the pieces that fit into one won’t also fit into another. This means you’ll have to bespoke fit/cut each and every piece, one at a time.

As someone famous once said: