by Windows » 27 Jun 2022, 12:32
Just to provide a summary somewhere, I've now created a few of these window screens and this is what I ended up using:
1. 16 x 38mm 2.1m Planed Redwood from Travis Perkins
2. 4mm rubber window screen spline
3. Pollen screen/flyscreen mesh
4. Glue or screws
Each screen is specific to a particular window - they all attach differently: wedged in the wooden opening in front of a sash, captured by the handle of a sash, trapped from above by the body of a sash, or fitting in the channel used for secondary glazing - so no fixings to attach the screen to the window - just gravity or wedging was enough.
In terms of tools, I used:
1. Dozuki for cross cuts
2. 3/4" chisel for doing half laps
3. 3mm chisel for doing the groove for the spline
4. Spline roller tool for shoving the spline in the groove
The inside of the groove is 1cm in from the inside of the screen, 3mm wide, and maybe 5mm deep.
After a few of these I was able to chisel the grooves fairly efficiently. Key is that the groove is not going to be seen and as long as it's fairly close to size it's going to hold the spline. I drew or scored a single line (scoring turned out not to be essential) for the channel then pared with the 3mm chisel to get the channel. As long as I went with the grain everything worked out great. The exact depth of the chanel and the texture of the sides are not important to the function and not visible so no need to be super neat.
I tried a few different ways of attaching the screen as well as the spline+channel method. Spline+channel was easily the best quality in terms of getting a nice tension on the screen and easy to try again if the tension wasn't right first time. The time it takes to cut the channels is the downside of that method.