Not many people make their front door on saw horses outside, but the weather was beautiful.....
The original plan for the front door had been a three-board door, but the extra wide boards I'd found in the woodyard (Thorogoods, Ardleigh, Nr Colchester) might just lend themselves to a 2 board door if I can squeak enough out of each board between the sapwood. These boards had been too wide to put through a planer/ thicknesser, so I cleaned them up "by hand", albeit not with hand-tools. First, the planer:
That's a bit of a mis-laeding photo, as I used it as a scrub-plane to start with, working along the board at 45 degrees, before cleaning up a bit with the planer orientated as shown. Then across the grain with the belt sander (40 grit), then with the grain (same grit), and finally finish off with some 100 grit paper:
Before anyone says that I should have cut the boards to length first, It was necessary first to fully reveal the edge of the sapwood, as I needed every mm of width I could manage to squeeze in. I ripped off the waste with a circular saw against a straight-edge:
After crudely cutting to a coupl;e of inches over-long, I was finally able to put the boards together to see what I was going to get:
You'll notice that one board is wider than the other, and that the junction therefore isn't in the middle. Worry not!!
I did a half-lap for the junction, using the hand-held circular saw and a router with a winged side cutter. There is no need for this to be furniture grade, as it will be permanently hidden:
I had in stock some 38mm thick off-cuts, albeit with lots of sapwood (that's why they're off-cuts). Perfect for my ledges:
The sapwood ran through the wood at about 30 degrees, so I cut it off at that angle, again using the straight-edge and circular saw:
I propped the boards roughly in place so as to mark the final door width on the boards so that I could make the ledges the necessary length:
Now, it's not as simple as that. The hinge side of the door has the ledges cut off square and close to the edge, but the leading edge of the door doesn't need that. I'll explain later.
Sizing up the aesthetics. Three ledges or 4? With the arched top, three looked right, and 4 looked silly. Oh, and no-one said the boards had to be flat:
Here's a little trick of mine. To prevent any board dropping relative to another in a boarded door, I came up with the idea of a pin in the adjoining edges. Stainless steel obviously, as it is oak:
Time to glue up. Before I fixed the ledges permanently in place, I opened the gap up between the vertical boards. This is seasoned timber, on the hottest day of the year in the middle of a heatwave. They're going to expand rather than contract. Note the lack of glue. Of course, there would have been no glue used at all in old doors. The key thing to note is that the ledges are only fixed to the boards at the outer edges, so all the seasonal movement will be at the middle of the door:
Note also the shaped end of the non-glued ledges, towards the top of the above photo. This is the end at the leading edge of the door. I left the door clamped overnight (not that the glue needed it, but I was running out of light):
The next day:
Cinched-over hand-made nails in pilot holes......and a revelation. I had often wondered why you see hammer-marks on old ledged door. I just thought that the carpenters must have been in a rush, or clumsy, but in doing this myself I found that you have to nail up from the underside of the door. So you're kneeling, and hammering upwards with only half a view of the nail-head, and the occasional accident is hard to avoid.
After the outer nails only in each ledge were nailed and cinched over, I offered the door up to the opening and marked the arch:
Critically, I remembered to off-set this by an inch:
Time to shape up the outer cover-strip. Note the two little rebates (10mmx3mm), again, all done outside on the saw horses:
At the bottom edge of the door is a weather strip, to deflect rain away from the underside of the door. This one has another function too:
There's a reason I keep off-cuts. This is ex-4":
Why the big rebate at the bottom? Well, the threshold seals that are commonly available don't deal with a 22mm thick boarded door. They're designed to 40-odd mm thick doors, so the rebate is to act with the external seal of the 2 in the threshold strip, like this:
Holes from the inside of the door for screwing the weather strip into place, and to take an oak plug:
Now, the magic ingredient. It is a watertight expanding foam seal, which will expand from its original 3mm to up to 13mm thickness, and depending on how tightly it is squeezed will resist in the ingress of a hurricane. I was worried about how quickly it would expand, so didn't take a photo mid-process, but you can see it here at the top of the fixed-in-place weather strip:
Now that the top of the door is cut out, and the bottom is determined by the weather-strip, I could cut the central cover-strip to length and fix that in place. Note the hugely oversized holes in the door boards, and the two lines of my expanding foam tape. Again, this is so that the inner edges of the boards are trapped against the ledge, but not constrained in movement across the grain:
Note that I left a small gap at the lower end of the cover strip, so that any moisture can dry off rather than be trapped between 2 pieces of timber:
The top end shaped: