Japanese Lamp

I Love Japanese Designs also and like you Lamps are my Favourite! You did a Beautiful Job on this one Nick!

The "Balance" & Design is outstanding. Looks like the "Golden Ratio" was applied for the side pieces.

Congrats and thanks for posting.

Rick

I really like this. I wish it would fit in the decor of our house so I could make one. Great work!

Beautiful, the Japanese are magicians with deseging and material.
Best thoughts,
MaFe

Yea, I got to join the "I'm A Japanese Design Fan" club…. Now who is going to show me the secret hand shake?...lol

Outstanding piece Nick. Well done….

Very elegant, I love Japanese design but sometimes people miss a certain element. You have done it just right. I love it.

nice work. i love the elegant design on the sides.

one question though: how are those corners joined??? are those extended corners just caps, or integral to the structural members?

This is a fantastic design and very well done.

If only you could hide the cord (or at least make it less noticeable). It's a distraction on a beautiful piece of art.

the japanese style is undoubtedly one of the most captivating!
and you captured it beautifully
well done

I've seen this lamp and send you an email about the joints, then searched here for japanese lamp, and here's the same beautiful lamp.

So, I was trying to figure out how to make those joints where the three pieces of wood overlap. Could you give me a hand here? At least the name of the joinery type?

thanks a lot,

i was wondering the same thing. I made a similar lamp once (well, twice) and used a 3-way lap joint. not the strongest, but definitely strong enough for the application. It's made by lapping in 2-D like normal, then making another cut halfway across in the 3rd dimension… if that sounds confusing I can get you a sketchup file with my design if you'd like.

Beautiful lamp. I saw some Japanese room dividers somewhere the other days that looked really nice. Thinking about building someday.

I was browsing this page [1] for a while and couldn't find any example like this one.

My guess so far is:

Make three frames (the horizontal squares ones) by half-lapping. Then join the vertical bars using mortise and tenons, and add a short piece at the top and bottom of each vertical bar.

That could work if all the pieces are the same width/depth, but are the vertical bars in this lamp a bit thicker than the horizontal ones?

AaronK, I'd really apreciate it if you already have a sketchup done.

[1] http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/_joineryterms.htm

sure - pm me your email and we can go from there.

I think it could be done like this: https://tinkercad.com/things/fSFItanOY3Q-japanese-lamp-joinery

(I'm not used to sketchup yet, and this site is simple enough to make a small model quickly.)

I was trying to figure out how to do it without cuting one of the bars, but couldn't find any way. Then I remember seeing something like this before.

i'll try to send you the file later tonight. meanwhile, i think it would be very hard if not impossible to do it this way (with all three members continuing across the joint) without cutting one of them, as you say. My version has the vertical piece simply lapped/mortised in and does not cross over the joint.

The joint you show is probably the strongest way to do this. At the same time, the lamp is not really going to be stressed. You could simplify things if you wanted by only mortising in the top piece (maybe even with a dowel?) and gluing on the bottom piece as a cap. The pieces are so small that the seaonal expansional stresses should never get too big.

I really love this one. I've looked at quite a few japanese lamp designs and this is by far my favorite. I also would like to see a sketchup of how the three way joint works. Any chance I can get that from you? Thanks,
Scott

I love this project. I will try to do it.

I love this design, it's totally beautiful. I too have been racking my brain for how to build this joint. I stumbled across this version of it on thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:784319; included here in a mockup for folks that don't like to click links.





It gets you pretty close, but there are two things I don't love about it, so I did some playing in sketchup to see what I could come up with.

First, rounding over the corners of the red piece in my example will probably leave a weak joint since you end up with so little side-grain contact. I would try modifying the blue piece to have a bullnose shape to the mating mortise (not even sure what to call this). This is pretty straightforward and with this approach I think you could make a joint similar to what's in this lamp, with one important exception …



Second - and this is where things start to fall apart - one cool thing about this lamp is that the vertical member seems to be just a little thicker than the horizontal pieces. That gives them a relative "lightness" that I just love. I would like to be able to modify this joint to achieve that. I thickened up the vertical member, which is blue in my example, and from the outside, things look great, but from the inside, the joint becomes visible, which is icky. I've shown this in image below. Also, looking at Nick's finished lamp (look at the inside corner of the joint on the bottom of the first image), this is obviously not the way the joint comes together, so I'd love to hear any thoughts other posters about modifications to the joint that could fix this.



All in all, we're I going to try a similar build to this lamp, I still think I would use separate pieces for the true cross members and the "trough-tenons", along the lines of gepatino's post above. Seems like that would be a straightforward, repeatable joint, with plenty of strength for a piece like this. It does lack the elegance of a magical 3-way half-lapped, hidden, physics-defying through-tenon joint, but at least I know how to build it