Thursday-Doors – Shed-Shed Doors

This is the final D-I-Y doors post for 2017. Regular readers know that this post has been coming because my buddy was picking on me about making these doors when we were at the bar a couple of weeks ago. These doors had to be pressed into service sooner rather than later, because the snow blower is in that shed, and the shed’s doors were failing. They were hard to open, hard to close and they weren’t doing the best job of keeping the weather out.

When you have to kick a door to open it, you’re in trouble. When you’re afraid that kicking the door will break it, you’re in deep trouble.

The main doors (the ones I had to kick) also had two design flaws that had recently become very annoying. First, they didn’t stay open in the wind. That means that when I was trying to get the snow blower in or out, I had to either prop the doors open or do the awkward reach from behind the storm cab to give them a push. The second problem is that the header is too low for the snow blower’s cab to easily fit through the door. That requires me to put the snow blower at its lowest to-the-ground setting and tip it just a bit.

One of these problems was solved by replacing the hinged doors with a sliding door. Sliding doors tend to stay wherever you put them. And because sliding doors hang from a track that is independent of the header, I can relocate the header later, without having to alter or even remove the door. Actually, since I was also able to remove the stop molding (the strip hinged doors close against), the doorway might be tall enough now.

As with previous D-I-Y projects, I’ve included most of the play-by-play in the captions to the photos. If you’re interested, click on the upper left photo to start a slide show that is roughly in the order of the production process.

Of all the doors I’ve built and featured here, these are the simplest. The design was based on the pile of leftover lumber that I was otherwise going to have to find a place for in my garage. This was kind of like those cooking reality shows where contestants are given a few ingredients and have to make something amazing. I was given 65′ of five-quarter pine stock and not quite two sheets of ½” plywood.

The five-quarter pine is the same stock I used to make the doors on the hanging shed and the garage attic. The difference is that with those earlier doors, the pine ended-up behind the scenes. On these doors, the pine frame is exposed and the plywood panels rest inside a slot (dado) that is cut into the edge of the pine. The pine boards are held together with tongue and groove joints, pocket screws and exterior glue. Because there’s very little movement on the boards and plywood (due to temperature and humidity) the panels are also glued into place.

This post is part of the wonderfully fun and addictive blog-hop, Thursday Doors, organized by the world-famous producer, Norm Frampton. Each week, Norm opens the stage doors to a band of walk-ons and extras as he carefully displays their doors for all to see. The door remains open for roughly 55 hours. As you enter, look for the blue frog – that’s the Director. He’ll show you to your dressing room. Be sure to check out Norm’s doors while you’re getting ready.

Tongue and groove joint. The joint provides mechanical strength and lots of glue surface.

Pocket hole joinery is very fast. Drilling all the pockets for one of the doors took about 10 minutes.

Anatomy of a pocket hole joint. The screw whose head you see is where we start. The screw whose threads you see is where it will finish. When all the surface area shown is covered in glue, this joint is amazingly strong.

This is a little confusing, because there are two doors here. The frames are light enough to move easily, so I’m stacking them to conserve space as I dry fit the components.

The pieces-parts go together in a sequence (if I remember what I’m doing). It starts in one corner and works out from there.

The two boards that form the corner go first, then the panel, then the next “stile” – then panel, and so on.

This is the way to do it. The long rail on the left will be the last thing to be attached.

This shouldn’t be happening. the plywood should have gone in before one of the long side rails. Now it has to be pulled into place through a slot that is weeping glue.

The large door is complete. The clamp is holding one of the sides that wanted to be a little bowed.

Second door has been assembled.

Defects repaired

The plywood had a lot of defects. I decided to patch them with body putty. It’s faster, cheaper and more weatherproof than wood filler.

You can’t sand body putty with a woodworking palm sander. The little pneumatic sander works well, but it was slow-going.

Painting.

This door is being supported by those two little “air pillows” – each one can support almost 300 pounds, and the control is very precise, so I can easily level the door.

This door is working. The trim needs to be installed, but I needed to focus on installing the other door.

The door isn’t attached yet. If you look close, there are two “helping hands” holding the track in place. Once level, I could fasten the anchors in place.

I needed to fabricate a roller mechanism to keep the door against the wall as it opens. I’m using chair casters, welded to angle brackets.

I had to cut the posts off with a grinder, or we would have walked into them…I’m sure of that.

Shed Shed Doors Under the Moon