Welcome to Thursday Doors! This is a weekly challenge for people who love doors and architecture to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos, drawings, or other images or stories from around the world. If you’d like to join us, simply create your own Thursday Doors post each (or any) week and then share a link to your post in the comments below, anytime between 12:01 am Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time). If you like, you can add our badge to your post.
The badge contest ended in a tie, so I will be alternating the badge I use here, but you are welcome to use either of the winning badges.
I am building a set of pocket doors that will separate my workshop from the garage it’s attached to. This will help keep the shop warm, should I try to heat it. It will also keep sawdust in the shop instead of all over our cars when they’re in the garage. These doors have been planned since I built the shop I framed the pockets and installed an 8′ (2.4m) header over the opening. When I built the shop. I already had the wood for the doors, however, I didn’t have the track and rolling hardware. This led to a huge mistake, but don’t worry, we will have a happy ending.
The doors are traditional frame and panel doors. Each frame has two long edges (called stiles) and three cross pieces (called rails). All interior edges have a groove (dato) that is the width of the plywood panel I will insert. The panels are being cut from some plywood that was leftover from a project last year. So, the project is to precisely cut the frame members, the panels and glue them together—easy peasy, right?
The stiles are made from pieces of wood that are 3.5″(8cm) wide and ~1.25″(3cm) thick. To make the doors look better, I decided to cut the inner stiles (the sides that will meet) in half so they will be 3.5″ when closed.
Things aren’t always what they seem. For instance, the plywood panel is “nominally ½” thick, but of course it isn’t that thick. To save money, they make the plywood slightly thinner. That makes it hard to cut a groove for the panel, since tools are designed to cut ½” grooves. To work around that, I cut a ⅜” grove and I cut it partially from both sides so the resulting groove fits the plywood.
Other challenges to this project included getting the four stiles the exact same length 78″(1.98m) . I did that by clamping them together and cutting them together. I also had to rely on several jigs and fixtures to keep these unwieldy pieces of wood from tipping or running at an angle while being cut and shaped.
I’ve put the photos inline so the captions are easier to read. Note: all of the photos were taken with the power off and material stabilized.
Important note: I have to take my car in for service tomorrow, and the dealership’s WiFi does not let me connect to blogs. Their security software considers blogs to be risky…whatever. I will visit your posts, but I will be late.
As you might suspect, I was able to fix the obstacle issue. It wasn’t straight-forward but it wasn’t difficult and it was kinda fun. I’ll share that next week when I finish this project.
I hope you enjoyed the photos even though it requires a healthy imagination to see the doors. I also hope you take some time to visit the doors submitted by the other participants. I am going to add some shameless advertising for our new book, but you can roll over that if you like.
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