Weird and Wonderful Tools: Japanese Wood Planing Competition

I love reading about Japan, it’s such a fascinating country and it seems like every day something new and fairly odd is coming out of the Land of the Rising Sun. Usually I'm writing about Japanese toilets, which is always an interesting topic as you’d be amazed at just how far they can go with a toilet. This time though we’re obviously going to delve into something with a DIY swing to it; specifically woodwork. How good are your wood planning skills? Because the skilled Japanese people in this video are about to smash them to tiny little wooden pieces.

The video shows the annual Kezuroukai exhibition in Japan, where participants try to shave off the thinnest strip of wood that you could possibly imagine. We’re not just talking wood like a toothpick here, we’re talking wood that’s only around 9 microns thick. To put that in perspective a micro is one-thousandth of a millimetre, and if you reach up and pluck out one of the hairs from your head that will be about 100 microns across. In other words, this is really thin wood! In fact it’s so thin that it looks more like transparent paper rather than wood, and you probably won’t be making a table out of it any time soon.

Each participant gets three attempts to shave off the thinnest piece of wood they can with a plane, and each time it’s assessed by a judge who measures the thickness with a special device. The impressive thing is that the world record currently stands at just 3 microns, and while this ‘competitive sport’ might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world to watch it’s still something to be applauded.

You’re welcome to try this out yourself with your very own planer, but it might take a lot of patience and a steady hand to get to the level of these guys. If you do try it feel free to send us the results and we’ll post them on the blog.

(Via Oddity Central)