Right! I'm getting sick of having to turn sideways through one half of a pair of double doors at just under 1200mm wide, especially if I'm carrying something and unlocking them at the same time.
So, I had Grantlands Timber supply me with a load of freshly felled 4 x 2 larch back in May. I cut it to convenient lengths and seasoned it round the back of my workshop. I covered it over with all sorts of offcuts.
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While waiting for the guitars' lacquer to cure, I decided to get out and start milling it for the pair of front doors.
I've never made proper doors before, so I've tried to keep it simple with the ledge and brace pattern.
This is the bit I can't get over, it's like being back at school in the woodwork class, but bigger! Plane face side, plane face edge. I now use the PT instead of the No 5.
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Now, to be economic, I wanted the ledges and braces to be sawn from the Ex 4x2 or 100x50 I should say. By planing out any sawmill errors and any curls that had found their way in, I was losing width. I theoretically would have liked the ledges and braces at 30mm and the TGV battens at 20mm to make up the 50mm width on the stiles and header. Ha! Fat chance!
In the end, I settled for 22mm for ledges, braces and battens and therefore 44mm for the stiles and header. So everything got thicknessed to those dimensions.
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Next on to the mortices and out came the mortiser. It's only a baby one, so I take it really easy, but the result is not too bad. I was doing haunched mortices for the header and I don't know the name for the ledges, but their tenons were half of the ledge thickness.
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I've only got videos of the tenon cutting on the table saw with a flat top toothed blade (for my not so informed as you lot Facebook friends and rellies) so you'll just have to settle for how it went together.
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Oo. I forgot to mention. I treated myself to a new toy for the workshop. You can see from the photos it's only about the size of a single car garage, and sometimes when I'm using the mortiser, the router or the bandsaw, they are not the same height as my bench, cabinets or saw table. So I bought a scissor lift for motorbikes. It's hydraulcly operated with foot pedals and it's been brilliant. I can just about lift the mortiser on to it and set it to the height of the saw table. It's been the infeed table, the outfield table and even my stool. It's got some pretty naff cast iron wheels on it, but I'm swapping them over to a Coldene twin set shortly.
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Back to the WIP.
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The swifter ones amongst you will not only have noticed that the doors are not the same width, but also the stiles are of different widths. The wider door will be the one that gets used generally and the little one will only be used when big stuff needs to be moved in or out.
The wide stiles are for the overlapping rebates that double doors need to close against each other.
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Now here is where I've messed up a bit because I spent ages on Sketchup planning the overlap, I just couldn't get my head round removing two rebates and only reducing the overall width by one of them
, But I didn't research the security market for rebate kits for sash locks. It seems they only come in 13mm or 25mm rebate sets. My rebate is 22mm, half the thickness of the doors. I would appreciate any ideas apart from the obvious, which I might end up doing, because I have been generous on the door widths.
Out came Sketchup again when I had to work out the width of the TGV battens including their expansion gaps etc.
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And I moulded the battens with these bad boys!
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And the outcome?
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And the tops of the battens got teed and veed, too.
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Next came cutting and fitting the braces.
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And then screwing them all together.
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I added hinge braces for the tee strap hinges already on the long term temporary doors.
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And that's as far as I've got while I research the lock industry a bit more. They ain't 'alf 'eavy!