Making and Gluing 1/4" skins

I am building a stave-core door and I’m looking for suggestions for preparing and gluing the 1/4” skins onto the cores.

It seems pretty clear that I should joint the core & plane it to thickness before gluing on the skins.

I intend to resaw the skins from 8/4 stock. I intend to joint & plane the faces of the stock, and joint 1 edge perpendicular to the faces. I was going to re-plane the sawn face of the stock after each skin is cut. Does that sound about right?

I am less certain about when to plane the sawn surface of the skin. One option is to glue the planed surface of the skin to the core first, and then run the assembly through the thickness planer. Looking ahead, I plan to run all of the stile and rail blanks through the thickness planer one last time to get them all exactly the same thickness right before routing the sticking and coping profiles. That step would take care of surfacing the 2nd skin.

I am really stuck on how to clamp the skins when gluing them onto the cores. The largest skins are 80”x5” (outside stiles) and 9”x37” (bottom rail). For the long stiles I was thinking of using 2 6’ lengths of 2” steel angle iron as lengthwise cauls. These are straight, and stiff enough that I figure I should get adequate pressure distribution even if I only use 4 or 5 clamps lenghtwise. I am concerned about these riding on high spots, so I’m thinking of cutting up some anti-fatigue mats and putting a layer of that stuff between the skin and the cauls. I suspect the standard technique is to used curved cauls, but I’m not sure how much curvature to put in them.

Thanks for your help!

-- Greg D. -- the price of freedom is tolerance