The Rice Chest
On to the kitchen! This room in our 70 year old Ranch home is cozy & functional but the one thing we parted with when we moved from our former Colonial is pantry space. That’s an amenity not truly missed until you have to live without. We manage with a large free standing cabinet next to the refrigerator that is used to store snack foods and other essentials. It also serves to conceal the various 5-20 lb. bags of rice that sit upright on the floor nearby. Rice is used almost daily in our house and, for all that they contribute, these bags deserve a better life. Once upon a time in Korea, uncooked rice (ssal) had its own chest in every kitchen. The ssal tuiju was heavy, purposeful furniture tucked away somewhere far from the fire and watery areas where the cooking went down. The picture above was taken at the Namsangol Hanok Village (Seoul), in the kitchen of one of the mid-nineteenth century homes maintained on the grounds of this special place. It would have held several bushel of grain in its day, dispensed with a scoop after lifting off the top, and thus the inordinately robust construction. The joinery beneath the lid is a derivative of Korean post & beam house construction methods. I’m not sure of the Korean name, but in the West we know it as a “castle” joint, for the pre-assembled post portion resembles the crenellations of a castle tower. If you break it down, each leg is joined to two intersecting cross members by a ‘T’ bridal joint on top of another, perpendicular ‘T’ bridal. This allows a half-lap joint to be formed between the cross members, themselves, deep within the castle tower (read: strong). A chance to try-out this joint was what moved a new rice chest up to the head of the “do list”.
Castle Joint in diagram
Reproduced with gratitude from j-woodworking, one of my favorite YouTube sites. Check him out. He is inspirational in how he teaches without the spoken word.
Design
There was only one spot in our kitchen for a new piece of furniture and this would replace a plant stand. The maximum width dimension for a piece in this spot is 21 inches and with a height of approximately 26 inches that would mean a ‘portrait’ rather than ‘landscape’ posture. While this orientation would certainly do the job, I was unsettled by the potential lack of authenticity. All of the rice chest examples in my books and online were at least as wide as they were tall (see above). However, while scanning my phone for pictures of additional examples I came upon another setting from Namsangol where several pieces had been clustered in a corner and there in the shadows was a small tuiju, probably used for red beans, with the exact proportions I was looking for!
Exemplar grain chest standing proudly next to big brother (oppa).
Design of the carcass from this photograph was simple. The challenge came in maintaining the look of a “chest” while re-engineering the piece to be more of a “cabinet”. We needed a solid storage place that would provide easy access to the various rice bags held within. Removing a top lid and then reaching down to pull up a 20 lb rice bag was not the answer. In fact, it was decided to fix the top permanently to the carcass and convert the front panel to a flush-mounted drawer front. The hope was that this piece would capture the essence of a centuries-old rice chest on the outside while doing its best to enable modern living on the inside (where it counts).
Materials
Pine is the wood most often used for the framework of rice chests. The panels have been made from a variety of woods but I decided to stick with pine throughout. I had some thick, clear grain Eastern White pine (Pinus strobus) in the shop that could work for the 2 in. square leg and cross members and some 5/4 and 4/4 material of the same species for the top and side rails, respectively. Some nice wide planks of 3/4 in. New Zealand pine, found at a local builder’s supply, would be used for the panels. Pinus radiata (so-called New Zealand pine) is actually a tree native to Monterey County, California and a couple of the small islands off Mexico. It was introduced to Australia in the 1850s, perhaps by California miners seeking better finds in the Australian gold fields. Like many “invasives”, it actually grows better in its new home and is extensively farmed throughout Oceania for lumber and pulp. Good on ya, mate!
Dimensioning
The top of the cabinet was made by glueing 1 1/8 in. thick pine boards together to make a 21 x 21 inch surface. This dimension defines the length of the castle joint cross members which will be made 1 in. shorter and mated with 25 in. long legs. The stock for these parts were cut from a large pine plank and the joint elements fashioned as follows. The two key dimensions for creating this joint are the leg thickness and the space between the castle’s battlements. All of the joint parts will be made to either straddle or fit within these two dimensions. The legs were made to be 2 inches square - easy. Many designs use 1/3 of this dimension for the width of the “valley” between battlements, but I wanted the “waist” of the corresponding cross member to be no narrower than 3/4 inch and so I fixed that number as the other critical dimension, making the “forks” 5/8 inch square, by subtraction. The valley between the battlements needs to be a full 2 inches deep (and true) so I decided to use my tenoning jig on the table saw with a dado saw blade. This store-bought contrivance allows one to accurately & safely pass an upright part through a table saw blade. Once adjusted properly so that the 3/4 inch blade stack exactly bisects the leg it was a simple matter to make the grooves in eight passes (2 per leg).
Cutting grooves on the leg at the table saw with a tenoning jig and dado blade.
The four cross members were also fashioned on the table saw using a dado blade and a cross-cut sled. As with the legs, a small prototype piece (aka stubby) was first marked, cut, the blade & sled then adjusted as required, then cut, adjusted, cut again until a good fit was obtained. Its extra work but it gives confidence that the “production run” will be successful. Now, this operation removes A LOT of wood (as sawdust) and it might have been more efficient to do some (all?) of the cutting on a bandsaw but I felt the dado/sled set-up would be more accurate and since I was using pine (i.e., a soft wood) I could hog out the slots in a single pass. Were I using a hardwood that necessitated several passes of increasing blade height to make a single slot I might have used a different approach. It’s always good to have options and to consider them before setting up for the cut.
With all of the joint dimensions established I still needed to treat the ends of the cross members in some manner to convert the block shape into something more appealing to the eye. It’s a defining feature for the “look” of traditional rice chests. Sometimes the ends are simply chopped at an angle but I like the rounded look better and it should be just as easy to create on the bandsaw. While I could have traced a template and made all 8 cuts freehand I thought maybe this would be another job for my circle-cutting jig. Since its construction earlier in the year, this simple device has helped to create the Stationery Chest and Owl House, where in each case the circle was discarded in favor of the surrounding “doughnut”, and also the Round Tabouret, where the “hole” was the goal. To achieve the desired curve I would need a radius of 1 7/8 in. This would place the pivot point inconveniently within the waist of the bridal joint and so I fashioned a separate platform that could rest on the jig and pivot in the desired arc while carrying the piece to be cut along for the ride. Chalk up another one - it worked great! I once saw a YouTube short titled something like “Give a redneck a table saw and he’ll make a bowling ball” which went on to show how a jig could be made that would allow a large block of wood to be turned into a spherical shape the size of a bowling ball on top of a spinning saw blade (shiver). I’d hate to see what type of gewgaw might be fashioned by an innovator from the South using my versatile circle-cutter (shudder).
The only pieces remaining were the 4 rails, the 4 side panels (one of which will serve as the drawer front) and the floor board. The rails would be cut from 4/4 white pine and secured to the piece with tenons into the legs. You know the sequence: first measure for the corresponding mortice in the leg, cut these with a mortiser (1/2 in. wide by 3/8 in. deep) and then fashion the tenons on the rails using the dado blade and cross-cut sled. In the process of cutting the mortices I also created a 5/16 in. wide by 3/8 in. deep groove (dado) in the legs to receive the side panels. After morticing a square cavity at both ends of the panel grooves I used a 5/16 in. bit on the router table to dig the “canal”. Worked great! and reminded me how smoothly things usually go when working with pine.
Next came the first dry fit. The rails squeezed snugly into the legs and held the castle towers rigid. Gratifyingly, all 4 legs touched the ground at the same time, too! The cross members were a tight fit. They’ll probably seat down properly with some sanding and mallet assistance when the time comes, but I did not want to risk seizing things up at this stage so I left them to the side. This dry fit was simply to mark the exact spot in which to cut dados into the top of the rails and bottom of the cross members to receive the bottom and top of the side panels, respectively. These were then created on the router table, as before.
Time to make the panels. Although extensively mill-marked (i.e., little ridges spread across the surface from the final operation at the saw mill) the New Zealand pine was uniform in depth (3/4 in.) and satisfyingly “flat” so I decided not to do any further thickness planing. Instead, one long edge was jointed true and the other edge created by ripping on the table saw to 11 in. in width. The finished panels needed to be 13 5/8 in. wide and so 2 5/8 in. strips were ripped from additional stock, all pieces cross-cut to the desired length and then glued to augment the width of the back and two side panels. The drawer front piece, measuring 16 1/2 x 13 in. would need to remain straight and true without any assistance from carcass framing and so I chose to rip three smaller pieces and edge glue them in opposing grain directions with the hope of thwarting warp. A rabbet (5/16 in. wide by 3/8 in. deep) was then created about the perimeter of the back and side panels to fit the earlier fashioned dados. This could have been accomplished in several ways, and I chose to use the dado blade/table saw mode rather than the router route. Once completed, a second dry fit predicted all would go well during the glue-up.
Even though I was going to build a pull-out shelf/drawer I still felt the need to make a cabinet bottom. The bottom is not necessary for structure or function but it should keep out dust and, anyway, no rice chest of mine would be going “commando” in the kitchen. I used 1/2 inch birch plywood for this element which sat in a dado cut into the bottom rails. The only trick was notching the four corners of the plywood to accommodate the legs, which was readily performed on the bandsaw using stops and a fence. Done!
Nice work, stubbies! Your faithful service has spared you from a fiery fate.
Assembly & Finish
This pine was very soft and so to prep the pieces for assembly I used a card scraper to even-out the glued edges on the panels and then sandpaper to clean-up all of the surfaces: 120 grit with an orbital sander, followed by 150 and 220 grits hand sanding. I put off cutting the top to final dimensions until the carcass was glued-up and I could then experiment with different overhangs and edge treatments. One final dry-fit revealed that I had goofed earlier in the construction of the castle joint. I removed too much wood, essentially eliminating the half lap joint between the cross members at each corner. I understand how this happened and it is not worth recounting. No worries! The double bridal joint is still more than strong enough and my castles now have some secret chambers within, oh well.
In fact, as I was doing this last dress rehearsal, assembling parts in different orders and taking careful notes on each step for future reference, it dawned on me that since the floor and side panels would be left to float in their dados and the castle joint would be plenty tight when seated, the only joints receiving glue would be the mortice and tenons in the bottom rails. This dry fit started by sliding the floor into the rails, which were mounted loosely into the legs so that the side panels could be dropped into place. Once this assemblage was pounded and clamped tight, the accumulated frictions held it all together quite well. Now, in previous attempts I had only dry fit one cross member into one leg at a time, in order to trim surfaces and confirm fit within a single joint. With an all-but-complete chest in front of me I decided to see how the cross members would fit when mounted into two legs at the same time. Things proceeded well and before long I was tapping the final member into place. The full 2 inch mating surfaces of the Castle joint puts a severe constraint on all pieces to align perpendicular to each other. So much so that the unglued rails held solidly, no matter how much I tried to tease a gap between them. This finding, and the realization that disassembly would involve the difficult chore of pounding the Castle joint open by striking at the four rounded corners, prompted a declaration of victory. No glue for you!
On to the drawer. To control the movement I decided to use old-fashioned roller hardware from the 1940’s called GO-EZ slides, as opposed to the newer, fully enclosed models or the even older wooden rails. My cabinet is not a standard cupboard depth and, with a hacksaw, this style of drawer slide is perfectly customizable. The roller track would support a drawer-bottom “shelf” made of 3/4 in. plywood to which a 3 in. pine backboard had been glued. Mounting this within the rice chest was pretty straight-forward, allowing 1/16 in. clearance on each side. A 3 in. tall “front board” was then mounted to the shelf and the drawer front panel affixed to this using cabinet fasteners. The drawer glided in and out smoothly even when tested with a mock handle up near the top. I was afraid that pulling on the drawer some 10 inches above the track would cause it to rock and then jam, but all seems well (whew!).
The hardware on original rice chests consisted of a lock to secure the removable top. This was not needed in my cabinet version; instead I required a drawer pull. You will find that all of the pulls on traditional Korean furniture are of the single- or double-hook variety where a hanging ring or semi-circular piece of metal is lifted and then pulled to open the drawer. While these would work on my rice chest, I felt they would be awkward to use. It seemed that a fixed drawer pull, like those typically used for kitchen cabinets/drawers would be a more natural fit. I perused the endless variety of cabinet pulls on the internet for something primitive; something that looked like it might belong on this, admittedly, novel furniture piece. A mixed iron and wood handle was chosen and then ordered, following approval from kitchen management.
Finally, the top was cut to leave a 1/4 in. overhang, (20 1/2 in. square) and the edges sanded. It would be affixed to the cross members using desktop fasteners as the final step once the drawer handle was installed. Waiting for the new pull to arrive gave me time to treat the wood with a coat of linseed oil. I wanted to achieve a bit of seal while keeping the surfaces as raw as possible and allow sunshine and daily handling to impart an “honest wear from use” look - no stain, no gloss. In fact, I did not apply any finish to the cabinet interior to avoid off-gassing odors that might taint the rice.
Installation of the handle and top produced a 21st century rice chest with hints of old and new. A time-tested design enriching modern life.
