Animated GIFs Illustrating the Art of Japanese Wood Joinery | Hacker News Reader

Animated GIFs Illustrating the Art of Japanese Wood Joinery

spoon-tamago.com

114 pointsmiles17 comments

One thing I've always noticed about Japanese Wood Joinery is that the results are very pretty (the beams look like they grew together), but not very strong (at least not relative to the strength of the original board - a strength that can be achieved with some glue).

For example look at some of the examples where the original board is cut down to less than 1/6 of its original size. Or where the design creates a large stress concentration point (in certain types of loading).

Is it mainly used in places where they can afford to overbuild it with very large pieces of wood?

What I always heard was: These techniques became a thing in japan because they don't have many forests compared to Europe, so they had to build structures that could be torn down and re-assembled. Especially temples, as monks would get prosecuted in one region, then have to move to another. Additionally, they don't many good minerals to use for nails and such.

I don't know if that is true though.

> as monks would get prosecuted in one region, then have to move to another

I guess lawyers have always been a problem.

Many of the joints used in Japanese joinery are designed to be strong in one aspect, say, tension or rotation. The book "The Art of Japanese Joinery" [1] discusses both the joints and under what situation the joint would be well suited.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Japanese-Joinery-Kiyosi-Seike/dp/...

This is tailor-made for Reddit's /r/oddlysatisfying.

I've never really had any desire or reason to have anything 3D-printed, but I would absolutely print a collection of these to have on my desk as conversation pieces and fidget-toys. The "lock" pieces could be printed a bit longer than the original designs call for to facilitate removal.

Search for "burr puzzles"; they are mostly made of wood and fit together similarly but have many solution combinations.

Watching those GIFs actually has something soothing/relaxing about it. It is actually quite a beautiful technique.

For those who've missed it, his twitter account (which has more gifs): https://twitter.com/thejoinery_jp

wouldn't these be great for multi-part 3d prints?

TFA;

Wood joinery is a dying art but the man behind these animations has hope. “3D printing and woodworking machinery has enabled us to create complicated forms fairly easily” he says, indicating that wood joinery techniques have plenty of applications for digital processing and manufacturing as well.

I thought so. I make snap together 3D printed robots, and thought this would be useful. So I bought a thick book on wood joinery. Unfortunately, many of the elements won't print on a home printer due to overhangs. If we ever get SLS printers at home, this stuff might be useful for that.

Yes

Does he offer the CAD files for download?

Is there a place that has the animations in GIF format where they can be downloaded?

if you could teach a toddler to put one those together imagine how smart it could be in later life (if that's even how smarts work)

That's pretty much the opposite of smarts. That's rote based learning, (which is very important in certain fields), but does not increase smarts (train smarts really, since it can't be increased, only fully employed).

Now if instead of teaching your toddler how to put them together you let him figure it out for himself, now you are getting somewhere.

hey try this app. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wood-joints/id837964581?mt=8

Did you made this app? Does it have at least one preview video? The static image look interesting, but not as interesting as a video can be for this type of demonstrations.

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