09-Jun-2025
It’s the beginning of a new week, and we’re slowly getting closer to the rainy season. Last week was very hot, but today is much cooler. Right now, I’m working on attaching panels, so I’m a bit concerned about the humidity, but I’m continuing with the work.
Today, I did the finishing work on the square boxes that I already assembled. In the afternoon, I moved on to the undercoating process.
As I wrote last week, I’m trying a new method of attaching the Aruki panel (moving panels) to this square box. Normally, I should be doing this kind of experiment on a test piece 😅, but I decided to try it on the actual product, thinking it wouldn’t cause any serious problems. It’s not a big change anyway.
I made a small adjustment to the length and position of the part where the Aruki panel touches the frame. And so far, I feel it’s working really well. Compared to the old method, it seems more stable.
Of course, I haven’t tested it many times yet, so I don’t know how it will react in the future—especially depending on the weather. But for now, I really like it. As I expected, the movement feels a bit tighter, so I installed it with a slightly looser fit in mind.
I don’t know how other craftsmen make theirs, so maybe someone is already doing it this way. But originally, there are no strict rules for making Japanese puzzle boxes, so I want to keep trying small changes like this based on my own ideas and experiments.
This might sound a bit abstract, but maybe I wouldn’t have needed to make this change if I were building the puzzle box in the more traditional way. I think this new method came from trying to simplify the process when I need to make a certain number of boxes quickly.
In the end, I was reminded that there are parts of the process where you really need to take the time and care, even if it slows things down.
