It started with a rainy day this week. So today the humidity was high, and it was actually a good day because I didn’t have any assembly work to do. In the morning, I started with the finishing work on the 4-sun double puzzle boxes that were already assembled. This time, all the side panels were covered with yosegi sheets in an ichimatsu pattern, so I was able to do the same finishing work on all the boxes. There were a few spots where I needed to repair the ichimatsu yosegi, but I was able to finish everything safely. After that, I moved on to the base coating work in the afternoon.
Because of the rain, it was a good day to work with yosegi sheets. So I moved on to the next project, attaching yosegi sheets to hexagonal boxes. Before that, I first needed to prepare the wooden boards for attaching the sheets. For these hexagonal boxes, the top and bottom panels are quite wide, so I need to prepare large boards. However, these panels also serve as both the outer and inner panels, so only one piece is needed for the top and one for the bottom. These panels are fixed in place, so they feel a bit like the side panels in a normal puzzle box (photo). Because of this, the structure is slightly simpler than a typical puzzle box. Then, the side panels of the box are attached around these top and bottom panels. This time, I plan to make a slightly larger quantity, so preparing the boards took more time than I expected. That said, it’s about 50 boxes. I am making them based on a request from the Japanese market.
It took quite a bit of time to shave the boards down to the correct thickness and finish them, so today I was only able to attach the yosegi sheets to the top and bottom panels. I plan to attach the remaining side panels tomorrow. For this piece, I will use traditional yosegi on the top and bottom, and the usual four-color ichimatsu yosegi for the side panels around them. As for the top and bottom panels, they also serve as part of the internal structure as well as the outer yosegi surface, so I use slightly thicker boards, about 6 mm. Five Aruki sliding panel will move, and for the ichimatsu side panels attached to it, I use boards of about 3.5 mm, the same as in standard 4-sun puzzle boxes.
