Return To The Katsugi

I always have multiple projects going at the same time (I'm just crazy that way). A while back I posted some photos of a drum body I had glued up that I was going to make into a katsugi oke diako. After gluing up a drum body I have to shave down the outside to make it round. So far I have kept all of my drum bodies at 16 staves. Most of the drums I make are small, so that makes the staves along the lines of an inch and a quarter to two inches wide on the widest side and reduces how faceted the body is before I ever start rounding.
With katsugi however, it's a different matter. Because of the size of the drums each stave is 3.14 inches wide and there is considerably more material to remove to make the body round. This is actually by design. Katsugi are most often played while being suspended from a strap over the player's shoulder. Usually there's a fair amount of moving and leaping about, so a lighter katsugi is more desirable. I make my staves from half inch stock, and once the body has been rounded a significant amount of weight is usually removed as the body thins down. When I was done shaving this body down it was more than two pounds lighter.

The first step is to rapidly take off as much of the unwanted material as possible, which I do using any or all of these tools with the occasional addition of a rasp or larger block plane. Katsugi are still 'small' enough that I can pin the body between my stomach and my feet to hold it stable while I plane off the corners. I usually just go out and sit on the curb, drum body held in this manner, and work until my arms are too tired and I have to stop.

I try not to gouge the body or shave any area too much. I want to take off just enough to make it round, but not so much that it weakens the finished body. Once the corners have been removed and I'm happy-ish with how round it's getting, I switch to 60 grit sandpaper. I use a standard sanding block I picked up at the hardware store years ago, and I sand against the grain of the wood. I keep at it until all of the tool marks from the planing, etc, have been removed from the body.



Once I've got all the tool marks sanded out I switch to 80 grit and change the sanding direction. I keep at that until all the cross grain marks from the 60 grit have been removed.
After the 80 grit sanding was complete, I did another pass with the grain at 100 grit. When that was finished I took a rasp to the inside edge of the body to form the lip that the head rests on.

I shaved the inside so the bearing edge was a quarter inch all around. Once the taper was rough cut I hit it with the same sequence of sanding as the rest of the body, 60, 80, then 100.

I gave the whole thing a good sanding with 220 grit, and by that point the surface was getting mighty smooth and I decided to put on the body "straps" that I had steam bent to fit the body earlier. I had left an overlap of the ends of the straps, so I did a dry fit and cut the ends flush.