THE HANDMADE DOOR

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

In most cases you'll need three heavy-duty loose-pin butt hinges. Mark the placement of hinges on the jamb, and take out the hinge piers, Now you can install half the hinge on the jamb, and slip the door into place. Bang the pins back in, and perform fine-tuning with a plane. The door should swing easily without binding, be square to the jamb and meet all jamb stops evenly.

Don't forget, these will be heavy, rock-solid doors built lovingly with labor and sweat; you won't want them (or you to get dinged or damaged. Have a husky helper at hand.

And what will you have built? "Just" a door? A friend of mine recalls a door, handmade a century ago, on which he remembers a flurry of incremental lines in pencil, tracing the growth of a hundred years' worth of one family's children. It bore nail marks from wreaths of Christmases past and the scratches of dogs who once chased horses in the street. And long ago it closed every night behind Father, home from a rough day at the Industrial Revolution.

Just a handmade door indeed.

The Batten Door

THE BATTEN DESIGN on page 29 is most often found on barn doors—one row of parallel boards held together by perpendicular and diagonal battens. By choosing tongue and groove or shiplap, these can be built quite weathertight. Where batten-door builders err most often is by using adhesives for additional strength: If the edge joints are glued, the boards will expand and contract at different rates than the battens, and the door soon warps to the point of skewed rusticity.

Another pitfall is fastener length: Make sure your nails and screws are just long enough to go through board and batten without projecting. The polite nomenclature for what happens if you don't is ruined, with obscene variations.

Cut pine or cedar boards to fill the opening as measured side to side, ripping them into equal widths so you don't have a thin oddball on the edge. Assemble the boards, leaving them slightly longer than the finished height of the doorway. With a framing square and pencil, lay out the exact vertical measurements of the finished door, and nail or screw the horizontal battens securely to each board. Nail or screw on the vertical battens. Trim the excess at top and bottom, and check for square again.

Now you're ready to apply the diagonal braces. The first brace will be contiguous, from one comer to the other. The second one is cut to fit closely. When done, carefully turn the door over and nail into the battens, two or three nails per; it's wise to draw faint pencil lines to keep the nail or screw heads pleasingly straight.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print