• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Japanese clog making

I see what you mean! I wonder why the Western fascination with Japanese hand tools has ignored those completely safe power tools?!
 
It is very interesting to see how many different machines are used in the process but of course the safety aspect is daring.
 
It's a video so good I watched it three times. The machinery is very interesting, I think some of it is homemade or heavily adapted to suit the job which you would've seen in similar workshops up and down Britain when we used to make stuff. I'd love to spend time there just looking at everything and how it works.

It seems the ducting and guards have been removed for the video, you can see the blast gates above some of the machines with inlets and hoses in the background not hooked up to anything. The machinist does look a bit apprehensive about some of the operations involving the big power-fed machines whilst being quite calm about the other jobs like using the ripsaw or the planing disk.
 
I liked seeing so many machines with a slicing action. The only one I knew about was the super surfacer, taking planing cuts with a big sharp blade. Some others worked a bit like a powered version of a mitre trimmer, but what about that big vertical circular disc machine? I've only seen that action on a much smaller scale in a food processor with a similar fine slicing disc, but unidirectional. It looked really dangerous but then maybe it's a bit like a bandsaw for safety. All the cutting force is down into the table and there's nothing that can draw the operator's hand into the edge.
 
Why dont they just attach two bits of wood to a plank :) I've always liked the surfacer machines, much better than our adzing machines. They look really cool when its a big 12" version. I bet that last guy is about 70 years old
 
Great video. It's good that the Japanese culture generally still values artisanal products. I've been in a few small workshops like that in Japan for knife making courses, and it is very similar in terms of machinery etc. The difference (compared with the UK) is that people in those workshops are trained, focussed and careful. They take great pride in their work and as a result the accident risk is much reduced. They have proper apprenticeships and revere the older makers. Thanks for posting.
 
Students of wooden footwear might like to compare and contrast this video, from Portugal.

It shows a craftsman making wooden clogs with extra studs on, to keep your feet dry on wet ground.

There's not a single machine, jig or measurement as far as I could see, but the job gets done.

 
That took me right back 60 years to a visit as a boy to Holland where we saw an old guy making clogs, I think it was green willow he was scooping out with wickedly sharp long handled shaped chisels a bit like in that video, a mixture of really sharp tools coupled with a quite soft almost wet wood that almost squeaked as it was sliced away has stuck with me.
 
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