釿 Chona (adze)

Planes, chisels, marking gauges, gimlets, saws...
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Brian
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 9:22 am

Excellent information!

I bought my Chouna from Yann, and he sent me a diagram that was drawn out by Shawn McVeigh, and it gave a general setup which was 210mm between the bottom of the arch and the tip of the chouna when placed in the same position as your first photo.

I've noticed a lot of users chopping on the diagonal when using the hamaguri and cutting a turtle shape, is this always the practice used or not always?

I also wondered how common it was skip the hewing and go to a band sawn log. I'd like to work my way up to filling the common requests of my local area for hand hewn timbers, and my first thought on the process was that I should probably bandsaw the logs to rough them out.
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Chris Hall
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 5:20 pm

If I might interject - and very much enjoying the discussion - there is a little terminology issue I want to nip in the bud right away.

The word for adz is chōna, not chona, and not chouna.

Written in hiragana, it is ちょうな.

While it used to be common to render words in Japanese that take a long vowel sound with the ~u, as that is how the Japanese do it (that is, take the sound cho, ちょ, and add the ~u, ~う, to make it chō, when this is simply carried over into romanization, a entirely misleading thing occurs in regards to pronunciation.

The rendering of 'chouna', to an English speaker unversed in how Japanese is usually Romanized and should be pronounced, will think the word is pronounced in the wrong way.

This sorta thing is typically how English speakers mangle Japanese, and once the mistake starts, it tends to perpetuate over time. How many people today say 'Karate' as 'carrotty' or, especially cringe-worthy, 'kara-oke' as 'carry-oki'. I hate that shit, and there is simply no need to go there.

So, please folks, let's stick with the most useful (modern) Romanizing technique, a diacritical mark which makes clear that the vowel is simply voiced for twice as long as otherwise: say 'cho' and hold the 'o' part just a little longer. That's what the macron over the 'o' in chō means.

By the way, Chōna is an interesting word in Japanese, a specialized carpentry term. It can be written in two ways, neither of which is all that scintillating:

, normally read only as 'KIN', and meaning hatchet

Or,

手斧, a pair of characters literally meaning 'hand', , and 'axe', .

That last one is confusing, since neither character in 手斧 takes a reading leading to 'Chōna. The normal reading one would imagine for 手斧 is in fact 'te-ono', which is apparently an old term for Chōna. Confused now?

And in neither case is an adze, strictly speaking, and axe or hatchet, as those tools have the blades aligned to the handle instead of crosswise.

Apparently some blacksmith in Japan changed the pronunciation of 'te-ono' to Chōna all by himself a few hundred years ago. In some parts of Japan the tool is termed a 'chon-na'.

Could write more on this topic if anyone is interested.

Thread hijack over for now, please continue.
Gadge
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 5:58 pm

Hi Chris,

I'll be the mug and ask the silly question: How do you get the macron over the vowel when writing a post?
Matt J
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 7:09 pm

Gadge, one option is to copy and paste from Chris' post!

Just to make sure it works: Chōna

Otherwise I think some googling is in order. Methods for typing special characters will depend on your computer and software.
Matt J
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 7:12 pm

Jacob,

Great posts! Can you talk about the handle a bit- is the curve natural, as found on a branch, or is it bent somehow? What types of wood are typical?

Thanks,
Matt
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Chris Hall
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 7:14 pm

Gadge wrote:Hi Chris,

I'll be the mug and ask the silly question: How do you get the macron over the vowel when writing a post?
A good question. I have a Mac so there is a drop-down menu with an option titled 'Show Emoji and Symbols', and within that one chooses 'Accented Latin' and then selects the appropriate letter from there.

On a PC, I'm not sure of the method, though a Google search would be the first obvious thing to do:

http://www.howtogeek.com/210824/how-to- ... or-tablet/
http://www.keynotesupport.com/websites/ ... ters.shtml

Or, you could simply cut and paste from the relevant entry, or look it up in the glossary section and cut and paste from there, as Matt just noted above.

Fortunately with Japanese, the only two to worry about are the long 'o', (ō) and long 'u' , (ū) sounds - it's not like it is endless or hyper complex or anything like that.
Gadge
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 11:04 pm

Fōūnd it using the Windows Character Map, which is a bit clunky. Unfortunately couldn't find it in ASCII code map.
nyamo_iaint
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 11:31 pm

Gadge wrote:Fōūnd it using the Windows Character Map, which is a bit clunky. Unfortunately couldn't find it in ASCII code map.
Yeah. It's in Unicode, but not in the ASCII bit. Unfortunately the codes are ō = 014D ū = 016B, and typing those using the ALT+<unicode value> trick get misinterpreted as they contain ALT-B and ALT-D which are stolen by Firefox / IE for various other purposes. Grrr. So it's either run CharMap.exe and copy them or run notepad and type them in there and copy them.

Iain
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Mon Feb 13, 2017 11:45 pm

Sounds like a bit of a PITA. I wish it were easier for those with PCs, much much easier.

Diacritical marks are a two-edged sword of sorts. On the one hand, if you know what the mark means, they give a reader the exact information about how to pronounce a sound in another language. On the other hand, well, there's the matter of knowing what the marks mean, and the fact that they are not as seamless to type in as regular characters. In the time before the personal PC came along, everything was printed using print sets, and a scarcity of accented characters in those print sets generally (especially for languages outside the main cluster of English-French-German) is why other ways representing different sounds were used. It's fine if you were a language learner and came to understand the way to pronounce the sounds when seeing those cues, but a minefield for those who have not studied the language under question otherwise.

For example, I cannot pronounce Chinese to save my life, regardless of which Romanization system is used. And when I visited Vietnam in 1997, thinking that the use of Roman letters with diacritical marks was going to make learning the rudiments of the language easier, I was in a for a rude awakening, as this example hopefully illustrates:
vsamplex.jpg
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Tonal languages are so tough! If you can't make the correct sound, the listener is simply going to have no idea what you are on about. I remember once being at a bus stop in Thailand and asking directions about getting to a certain town I wanted to visit. I must have tried pronouncing the town name for 20 minutes before i somehow stumbled upon the right nearly-correct pronunciation and one of the locals gathered around repeated it back to me and everyone went, obviously enough, "oh! That's what he means". It was frustrating.

Fortunately Japanese is not a tonal language and there really aren't too many sounds which challenge the native speaker of English. The same cannot be said the other way around however.... The long and short vowel sound issue however, is one of the major pronunciation pitfalls, and if you don't use a long vowel sound when appropriate, or do the reverse, it can lead to (best case) blank stares, or (worst case) anger/derision as you inadvertently say something rude.

Typing in 'chona' in Japanese (ちょな) on Google for example, will not lead to any pictures of adzes, but you will find lots of pics of 'Chona' the town mascot for the town of Chōnan in Chiba Prefecture:
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Okay, seriously, hijack over....
NoriOkada
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Re: 釿 Chona (adze)

Tue Feb 14, 2017 12:38 am

Whoa, I thought that cartoon character was a chicken with weird pock marks, but once I googled it using the japanese characters, the face is actually a slice of lotus root, with a mini shiitake mushroom for a hat!

Ok, back to regularly scheduled programming...

Thank you Jacob for the neat details!

I've always wondered with the curved blade, how does one sharpen it?

I've read one can slide the edge along a flat sharpening stone, like some do with yari-ganna, but I've also read that optimally one has a separate stone with the shallow curvature, to match, I think I read that on Teshiba Mandaray's website. So then you'd have to keep a whole set of stones with increasing grits with the similar concavity? Or do you just keep touching up the edge?

Nori

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