November 2008
Intermediate to advanced
192 pages
8h 32m
English
Making Connections
Neatly lined up along the walls of Len Cullum’s 1,500-square-foot north Seattle workshop are handmade Japanese chisels, saws, and planes.
In a building rumored to have once been a shark oil processing plant, Cullum, 42, creates Japanese-style shoji doors and windows, garden structures, and furniture.
Cullum constructs these pieces using traditional joinery, a specialty where it’s crucial to be precise and to understand the temperamental qualities of wood because there aren’t any metal fasteners to hold together poorly measured or cut pieces. Port-Orford-cedar is his favorite wood to work with. “It planes to an amazing sheen and it smells great,” he says.
His philosophy dovetails with ...