After thinking about it a lot and looking at other contemporaneous doors, I came to the conclusion that it was an optical illusion and that the design was of the more traditional variety with inset panels rather than flush. That then led to a much simpler construction - or so I thought.
I also decided that this door would be my first (and last!) door made in the traditional fashion with 'real' joints. Haunched tenons an' all
Materials
Originally I planned to use sapele for the rails and stiles but realised that located where it was, the door never had that much exposure. No direct sunlight. No rain as it was sheltered. So the sapele I'd bought was set aside for the front door which is full-on South facing.
The inset panels were to be 18mm Medite External - one level below the eye-wateringly expensive Medite Tricoya - and glued into a simple rebate as opposed to a groove in the rails and stiles - the logic being that if the glue joint became compromised then water would sit in that groove in the rails and eventually rot them. By gluing into a rebate any water ingress had a chance of getting away.
Design
The aspect ratio of Georgian doors tended to be wider and squatter than today's doors - the average height of a man back then was only around 5ft 5inches (5ft 9inches today). Our existing door opening was of the modern aspect ratio and so to give the impression of a squatter door, the rails were widened up a lot.
Joints
Haunched tenons. Double tenons. All pretty much as Coley's door. Thing is though measuring them up and deciding on dimensions etc needed a bit of thought and so I used SketchUp. Here's just a couple. For some reason, I decided not to fit the Medite panels centred on the centre-line of the rails and stiles - a decision that I would later come to regret.
Also for strength and because I didn't want to compromise the joint of the lock rail (and also from an ergonomic perspective), I decided that the door lock would be located in the stile above the lock rail.
The one advantage of using something like SketchUp is that to model the corresponding joint in the stiles, all you have to do is bring a 'blank' stile into the right place relative to each rail and then simply do an Intersect with Selection and bingo...the mortice etc in the stiles are created for you.
Well, on paper. Still got to make them.
Tenons
Lots of ways of making tenons -
- bandsaw (mine wasn’t man enough),
by hand (too onerous…besides my thumbs aren’t that great for holding hand tools),
table saw (no jig and besides the lengths were too unwieldy IMO)
cross-cut mitre saw with trenching capability (do-able but requiring a fair bit of clean up afterwards with hand tools)
spindle moulder (my preferred option).
With the spindle moulder, if you don’t have a tenoning head (I didn’t), then the next best option is a block with a countersunk centre bolt where you can fly the tenon over the top of the spindle shaft to get the length that you need on the tenon. That was when I discovered that the tapped thread on the Hammer spindle mandated a special washer that wasn't easily available on the market and certainly not for my existing block.
Luckily for us we have a top chap called Bob who kindly made me up the appropriate washer for my block. So good to go. Um…no. I discovered that limitations of the Hammer spindle guard meant that it couldn’t be pushed back far enough to give me the cutting length that I needed.
So..what to do ? Part do it on the mitre saw and finish on the spindle ? Or jury rig some sort of guard to use in place of the Hammer spindle guard and do it all on the spindle moulder. Or be very, very, very careful and simply remove the Hammer spindle guard, take maximum advantage of the sliding table to clamp the rail to, keep all body parts well clear and JFDI. I chose the latter.
…to be continued