Building Woody Joe’s Shinmei-zukuri Shrine – Part IV

Construction is moving right along with step 4. Things are pretty straight forward here and involve the installation of supports under the edge of the floor as well as a railing.

Step 4 << Pillar, Railing Installation>>

The Japanese text begins with a reminder that the side of the building with the door is the front.

Laser-cut parts 2A, 2B and a pair of part 2D are needed for the first task. These are glued flush with edge of the floor. Note that part 2B needs to go in the front.

Part 15 are 3mm diameter milled dowels 16mm long and there are 27 of them. These are glued into the holes in the newly added laser-cut parts. The dowels should be a nice, snug fit. In my kit, a few of the dowels were a little thin, but as it turns out, Woody Joe included a few extra pieces, so I picked the best ones to use.

With the posts in place, the next task is to add the railing. This consists of 5 laser-cut pieces numbered parts 7B, 7C, 7D, 7E and 7F. These pieces are designed in such a way that the ends interlock.

One leg of the railing is designed to be pulled out, allowing the pieces to slide together. I didn’t have any problems with this, but I was nervous about snapping the parts, so I made sure to only pull out the rail leg just far enough to put the parts together.

I assembled the railing pieces together before gluing them to the model. When adding the railing into place, just make sure the open side of the rail ends up in front of the door.

The final task is to simply add the metal decorative pieces to the ends of the lower beams. The pieces, parts 27c, are on the sheet of adhesive backed thin metal.

The metal has a kind of grain to it, so I made sure all the pieces went on with this grain running in the same direction.

Now, I don’t really understand the details of the construction of the real shrine building, and I’m not sure how close this model is to the real thing. In the prior step (Step 3), I added the roof beams, but in the next step, this is covered by another framework, which seems odd. But, I’ll just get through this and one day I’ll hopefully learn more about what the real temple construction is like.

Next step will deal with this outer roof framework.