# 48" Pocket Door



## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Planning the practice version *

I have the framing and hardware installed for a (nominal) 48" wide pocket door off my front foyer. Well, it needs a door and I've decided to have a go at building one.

The other interior doors in my house are the common hollow core, wood grained, 6 panel doors common at the home improvement stores. They are painted white. This door will be just a few feet from the front door, which is a wood grained fiber glass door that looks like a stained & finished wood door (if you don't look too close). It is also panel style. So its clear that I want a panel style door, but it could be either stained & finished or painted gloss white depending on how it turns out. I plan on matching the sizes of the rails, stiles, and panels that are on the other interior doors, so I am planning on 9 or 12 panels in this door.

Because of the large door width I installed the split studs to handle a 1-3/4" thick door.

I've looked at a number of postings on doors here on LJ and also on another woodworking site. It is probably overkill, but I am planning on following more-or-less the construction method described by a1jim here. Because this is a relatively big piece and this process uses a number of techniques that I've never done before I'm going to take some advice I got on my earlier post and make the first one out of construction grade 2x's.

The first part of the process is to build up blanks for the rails and stiles. Jim describes a 1-1/4 core that sounds to me like butcher block, that will be covered with 1/4" skins. I do have a couple of questions I hope someone can help me with:


Should I plan on using a vacuum bag when I go to gluing on the 1/4" skins?
Does finger jointing significantly improve the stability of the blanks? It's going to feel silly chopping up long stock into short pieces just to assemble them back into long pieces again, but if I do that I suppose that the pieces should be mixed up before assembly.
When its time to make the real door out of hardwood, are there any ways to save money on the material used in the core? Can I use a less expensive species, or is there someplace that will sell short scraps at a discount?

This is looking like it's going to be quite an educational experience. Ouch.


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## cjohnson (Oct 27, 2010)

GregD said:


> *Planning the practice version *
> 
> I have the framing and hardware installed for a (nominal) 48" wide pocket door off my front foyer. Well, it needs a door and I've decided to have a go at building one.
> 
> ...


I am not sure what the best approach is for the core, but as far as getting wood, you should check local hardwood suppliers. They will often have "short cuts" that are sold for less per board foot. THese are generally 3 foot pieces that have been left over after cutting boards to length. My local supplier has a huge selection of short cuts in all species. If you are going to cut them up and glue back together it sounds like it might be worth while to search out a source.

It is best to ask your local supplier because the short cut bins are sometimes in some out of the way place that may not be seen.

Also you may want to look into the affect of moisture content on the stability of your project. It may be worthwhile to get a moisture meter and make sure the wood is dry enough and is properly acclimated to your shop before starting.

Good luck with your project


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## patron (Apr 2, 2009)

GregD said:


> *Planning the practice version *
> 
> I have the framing and hardware installed for a (nominal) 48" wide pocket door off my front foyer. Well, it needs a door and I've decided to have a go at building one.
> 
> ...


maybe a lattice half lap crisscross inner frame
to keep the weight down
if it is exterior
use some styrofoam in the voids
by making it that way
you can ad panels where they belong
to make it look like the others


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## canadianchips (Mar 12, 2010)

GregD said:


> *Planning the practice version *
> 
> I have the framing and hardware installed for a (nominal) 48" wide pocket door off my front foyer. Well, it needs a door and I've decided to have a go at building one.
> 
> ...


Inner core, you might consider red cedar. It is a lighter density and still very stable.


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## lilredweldingrod (Nov 23, 2009)

GregD said:


> *Planning the practice version *
> 
> I have the framing and hardware installed for a (nominal) 48" wide pocket door off my front foyer. Well, it needs a door and I've decided to have a go at building one.
> 
> ...


I would suggest loose tenons. David and Rob steered me this way and it really simplified the door building process. And they are strong.

I would be sure to make all the stiles run one piece. That way when you start the glue up you can hold your alignment with a dry fit stile and avoid the insane race to beat the glue drying. lol This will also help to keep the door square.

Be sure your table saw is cutting square or nothing will line up and the door will make a better set of skis. lol

Good luck and we will be looking forward to the blog on your build. Rand


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

GregD said:


> *Planning the practice version *
> 
> I have the framing and hardware installed for a (nominal) 48" wide pocket door off my front foyer. Well, it needs a door and I've decided to have a go at building one.
> 
> ...


A heavy door shouldn't be a problem. The hardware is beefy and the header holding it is very stable.

Maybe red cedar for the practice door rather than 2x's. I'll have to check the cost.

I see the advantages of one-piece stiles - that is probably the way I'll go. Haven't thought through the details of the joinery but I know some people like loose tenons.


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## dlmckirdy (Oct 27, 2009)

GregD said:


> *Planning the practice version *
> 
> I have the framing and hardware installed for a (nominal) 48" wide pocket door off my front foyer. Well, it needs a door and I've decided to have a go at building one.
> 
> ...


Plan to use the filler from the practice door in the real door. Just take it easy with the glue, or use just screws to install the practice stiles. This will save on cost. Also, if you are adding a door skin or veneer to the practice door, take it very lightly with the glue so that it can be removed to use the core on the real thing. I agree that mixing the shorts up before glue-up would be the best way to minimize any warp or twist (that is the reason for using finger jointed shorts to begin with - cutting the shorts relieves any hidden tension in the wood so that you can get a board that is nearly guaranteed to stay straight).

How are you going to install the panels? Maybe the core only needs to be made of 3/4 or 4/4 stock so that there is room for the skin/veneer and the moldings while maintaining your 1-3/4" final thickness.

Good luck on your build, it sounds interesting.


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Big sticks to little sticks to big sticks*

I have decided against building a practice door.

Instead, I'm looking at the construction process of a sequence of sub-projects that build door parts. I figure I can practice each step before I do it, and throw out any parts that don't work out.

The first sub-project in the door building process (described here) seems to be to build the cores for the stiles and rails. canadianchips suggested red cedar for the core because it is relatively light weight. It also is relatively cheap and easy for me to get, so I got a stack of 10 ft 2×6s:










*Big Sticks to Little Sticks*

The first step of this process is to cut the big sticks into little sticks. I thought I read somewhere to avoid running stock shorter than 18" through my planer - maybe it was the manual, maybe it was an hallucination. So I chopped the big sticks into 30" sections with the miter saw, and then ripped each section into 3 sticks on the bandsaw, producing this stack of parts.









After jointing and planing these pieces came out to 1-3/4" x 1-1/2". I then cut them in half to 15" length, and where necessary cut out cracks and troublesome-looking knots. I decided to glue them up into cores that were 1-1/2" thick which I would subsequently joint/plane down to 1-1/4" before applying the 1/4" skins. Unfortunately, although my finger joint bit has a cutting length of 1-1/2", it will only finger-joint to a thickness of about 1-1/4". I figured out that if I finger joint the center 1-1/4" of the thickness I would end up two "fat fingers" on the top and bottom; if I then removed the fat finger on the top of one piece and the bottom of the mating piece they would fit together properly.

Here is a batch of parts with the finger joints milled. On the early batches I discovered that the bit was pulling the work into the bit a little, so when I was milling the later batches I clamped the work to the miter gauge.









*Little sticks to big sticks*

I have 3 8' lengths of 2" square steel tube, and 3 6' lengths of 2" angle iron that I use for supporting temporary assembly tables. I used the tubes to support a scrap of plywood, and leveled/shimmed/clamped to make a flat gluing table. I used two of the angle irons to form a straight fence. I drilled holes in the center of each part so I could screw it down to the table as I glued up the butcher-block assembly. I used 2-1/2" Kreg screws and added a "washer" of 1/4" hardboard. I drive these screws with a drill, but then do the final torquing by hand to ensure that they are tight and minimize the frequency that I strip them out.









It was not so easy getting the finger joints to mate up tightly. I used a 50" bar clamp to pull each finger joint together before screwing down the piece. End-to-end butt joints would have made the glue up much easier, and it seems to me it wouldn't weaken the assembly if these joints were staggered. Given that this will be an interior door I suspect this construction method is overkill for the application, so I'm not going to worry about the relatively loose finger joints. If I ever do them again I will probably make some sort of clamping fixture to get and keep the finger joints tight. I might even do one strip at a time first, joint the sides of the strips, and then glue the strips side-by-side in a second glue step.

Here is a shot of the rough cores. The rail cores all have 1/2" holes in them lengthwise for 3/8" allthread that will pull the outside stiles together horizontally in the final door assembly.









lilredweldingrod suggested using loose tenons for the final assembly, and I plan on doing this. He also suggested making all the stiles full length. I'm opting to make only the outside stiles full length and keeping all the rails from outside stile to outside stile. I'm thinking that with the allthread running the full width of the door I'll be able to pull the door together into the final assembly while dry fitting and later when gluing, and this will help me figure out how to get the whole thing square in the end.


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## wwbeds (Jul 1, 2007)

GregD said:


> *Big sticks to little sticks to big sticks*
> 
> I have decided against building a practice door.
> 
> ...


I have a pocket door 48×96 being built. I like the ideo about the allthread. I may try and add some sort of mechanical fastner to my door when it gets here.


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Take 2: Little sticks to big sticks*

The core blanks are to be edged with, and then faced with, African mahogany. My plan is to resaw 8/4 stock into 5/16 or 1/4 skins for the faces of the stiles and rails. Simple enough if I had done these basic things before, but that is not the case.

As I was setting up for resawing - my first significant resawing experience - I was not happy with my cut quality and was getting frustrated setting the bandsaw fence for the blade drift angle. I have a Rikon 14" delux bandsaw and the fence adjustment involves messing around with the stand-offs that hold the fence rail to the table. Unfortunately this not only affects the drift angle, but also affects whether the fence face is perpendicular to the table. I figured that I had enough on my plate with the door project, so rather than build a resaw fence I bought a Kreg Precision Bandsaw fence. Installing it was not so straightforward since the slot in the table for removing the bandsaw blade comes out the front of the table - right through the middle of the Kreg fence rail. I'll post my solution in my "jigs and techniques" series when I get some pictures.

I got some advice from the staff at my local Woodcraft store on bandsaw tune up. I pulled the blade and went through the whole blade installation and tune up process. In the end I got much better results, but noticed that I was using a much slower feed rate. Oh, and I also ordered a Woodslicer blade because of its great reviews, although I haven't tried it yet.

On Lumberjocks I was asking some questions about gluing the faces. Someone who makes doors professionally mentioned that putting hardwood over a softwood core might not be a good idea because the two might expand and contract at different rates and crack or check the hardwood face. As this is an interior door I was hoping this wasn't going to be an issue. But the other thing is, I didn't know if the red cedar I had used in my first cores was adequately dried. What the hey, I'm doing this to have fun, right? At least that is what I keep telling myself. So wouldn't it be *more* fun to do new cores in poplar?

So about 2 weeks ago I picked up 100 bf of 4/4 #1 common poplar at a bit over $1/bf. Not really any more expensive than the red cedar; too bad I didn't think of this at the beginning. The downside was that they did not have in stock anything thicker than 4/4, and what I got was typically a bit shy of 4/4, so there were a lot more staves needed to get the required widths. I wasn't too sure how much more of this fun I could stand, so I decided to make it easier on myself and not limit the stave length to 15" or less. Some are nearly 30". I also didn't bother with finger joining the ends of the staves - I just butted the ends together. A third change that I made was to have 2 tunnels for allthread through each of the 2 wide (8") stiles. To help with the glue-up I got a glue bottle with a 2" roller. I went through what seemed to me to be a lot of glue. I had about the right amount of squeeze-out, so I think the roller worked better than the putty knife I had been using to spread the glue.

Anyway, the core blanks are now done. Here are some pictures…


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Adding the mahogany*

With the poplar cores done I have started wrapping them with mahogany.

Progress has been slow as I:

figure out what I need to do next
figure out what I need in order to do what I need to do next
figure out what to buy and build so I have what I need in order to do what I need
figure out how to use what I've bought and built
figure out how to fix issues with my shop that are becoming a concern as the project proceeds.

The first step in adding the mahogany was to edge the poplar cores. Dust collection issues hit me square in the face - literally. But I did manage to get mahogany edges on all of the cores.

In working with the 8/4 mahogany stock - straightening the edges with the table saw and preparing 1-1/2" x 3/4"-ish strips for the edges, I discovered that the dust collector blade guard on my Saw Stop PCS works very well - except when it doesn't. These operations involved many operations where it doesn't work at all. The worst experience was putting a straight edge on a 84" length of 8/4 stock without cutting off any more than necessary. During most of the cut the saw blade is removing less than a full kerf of wood - the fence side of the blade is cutting wood and the other side of the blade is cutting air. As the chips are sliced off the wood they are thrown towards the front of the saw at an angle away from the fence - which is right where I stand to get the most control for feeding the stock through the saw. Face full of sawdust - not good.

So I decided to address some of the dust collection issues in the shop. First, I picked up a respirator and a stack of NIOSH P100 rated filters for those situations where I can't avoid working in dust - particularly cleaning out the DC and the shop vac filters. The particulate-only filters are much smaller and lighter than cartriges that also remove chemicals and make the respirator less uncomfortable. Second, I made a small DC hood with magnetic feet that I can position on the table to catch most of the sawdust from a cut such as the one I described above. I'll post that on my Jigs & Techniques blog when I can. Third, I cleaned my DC filter bag, and then ordered a canister filter from Wynn Environmental to replace it. Fourth, I cut a hole in the side of my garage (shop) and installed a gable ventilation fan. Finally, after installing the canister filter on the DC I also rigged something up so it would exhaust into the ventilation fan sending any remaining dust out of the shop. Another item for my Jigs and Techniques blog I guess.

Having finished adding mahogany edges to the poplar core blanks and resolving my DC issues, I turned my attention to the skins for the faces of the cores. I bought Amana's router bit set for exterior doors because I liked the profile better than the alternatives. The reason I selected that at this stage was so I could determine how much of the skin was going to be removed by the profile. Using this profile and skins of 1/4" thickness, I only need the skins to come within 3/8" of the edge - the rest will be removed. This gives me a bit of wiggle room when figuring out how to cut the skins from the stock that I have.

The next challenge was resawing. I better leave that for the next installment.


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Edging the Rails and Stiles*

I've been progressing on the door more consistently than I've been posting on this blog. Tonight I hope to catch up with myself.

The edge strips of mahogany have been glued to the cores of the rails, the interior stiles, and the interior edges of the long stiles. In order to maximize yield I did not use full-length strips of mahogany. Instead I used shorter lengths, being sure to locate the ends where they will be covered by the coped end of a rail or stile. In several places I even used short lengths of poplar to fill in gaps between the ends of the mahogany. The ends and the poplar will all be covered.

Here is a picture of one of the long stiles. If you don't look at it too close, it illustrates a "typical" edged core. The white poplar gaps in the read mahogany edges will be hidden by the coping of the rails. If you look at it more closely, you'll notice something is going on. More on that in a subsequent post.


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Snipe Hunting: Mahogany faces for the stiles and rails*

My plan called for 1/4" skins to cover the faces of the stiles and rails.

Because I have no prior experience with resawing, I bought some red cedar 2×6's at the local big box store and did some practicing. Not happy with the initial results I added a Kreg Precision Fence to my bandsaw, and also built a resaw fence. I also switched to a Woodslicer blade.

First I had to joint the faces of the stiles and rails. Generally I don't notice much snipe from my Dewalt 735 planer. However, I began to see snipe at both ends of longer and heavier pieces after running them through. My parts were not so long that trimming them to final length would remove the snipe. So I used the standard trick of attaching strips of scrap to the outside edges of the work pieces that extend 3" or so beyond the ends of my parts, so any snipe will be limited to the scrap strips and won't affect the cores. In my case I used the 1/4" red cedar boards I made while practicing my resawing technique.

I used the same trick on the stock that I was resawing for the face skins. Here again, I did not plan for my skin stock to be sufficiently long that I could remove any snipe by simply trimming the skin to length. In this case I glued the scrap strips to the edges of the face skin stock, so each face board would also have scrap extenders. Here are a few pictures:



















These extenders also helped to control the stock at the end of the cut when I was resawing the face skins.

Another challenge that I had was that 2 of my rails are wider than what my 6" jointer can handle. When constructing each of these wide cores I first glued up 2 4" wide sections, jointed one face on each of them, and then glued them together while carefully aligning the jointed faces. While they were fairly flat to begin with I still wanted to make one more pass to joint the face. For each stile I edge jointed 1/4" thick scrap strips. I then clamped the stile to the top of my table saw and carefully tacked on the scrap strips making sure they were firmly against the table saw top. This was a "twofer" - it allowed me to face joint these wide parts on my planer *and* it eliminated any snipe on the parts.


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

GregD said:


> *Snipe Hunting: Mahogany faces for the stiles and rails*
> 
> My plan called for 1/4" skins to cover the faces of the stiles and rails.
> 
> ...


Ooops. I forgot entirely to mention the glue-up of the face skins.

For cauls I used 3/4" plywood cut into approximately 6" x 11" pieces. I also cut strips of Harbor Freight anti fatigue mats. I used these as pads between the plywood cauls and the face skins. Even though the plywood will bend under the pressure of the clamp, it will still manage to compress a fairly large area of foam pad, so it seemed to me that this would help spread the pressure over the large area of the face skins.

I did both sides at the same time. I used Titebond original, and a glue bottle with a 2" roller.


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Stile with embedded T nuts*

This door will have 6 lengths of 3/8" allthread running the lengths of the rails from outer stile to outer stile. The outside edge of one of the stiles will remain hidden in the door pocket, so I'm going to have the ends of the allthread exposed on that edge.

However, the other edge of the door will be exposed. In order to leave a clean, finished edge I installed T nuts into the core of that stile before gluing on the last piece of edging and the facing. During final assembly the allthread will be threaded into these T nuts and the finished edge of the door will be undisturbed.

The blanks for all of the other parts of the door have been finished - edged and faced with mahogany. The rails have been cut to final width. I laid out the blanks for the rails and the long stiles on the floor and marked on the long stiles the locations of the tunnels for the allthread. I then drilled 1/2" holes through the incomplete stile blank. One side of the stile already has the mahogany edging and looks like this:










These holes and the small bit of poplar in the middle will be covered by the 8" wide rail running across the middle of the door. I will need to position the door knob between these two holes (it will be running through from left to right in this view) in order to clear the allthread.

On the other edge of the core I installed a T nut in each of the holes. I used 2 1" roofing nails in each T nut to hold them in place (I had some and they fit). This is a photo of the bottom half of the stile core with the T nuts in place:










I then glued 1 more strip of poplar to the edge of the core with dados cut to leave clearance for the T nuts:









With that done I glued on the mahogany edging. Here is a close up:









And here is a shot of the stile ready for facing:









After that I put 1/4" thick mahogany veneer on both faces of this core.

Now all the blanks are ready for final surfacing & sizing, and after that the joinery.


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## FatherHooligan (Mar 27, 2008)

GregD said:


> *Stile with embedded T nuts*
> 
> This door will have 6 lengths of 3/8" allthread running the lengths of the rails from outer stile to outer stile. The outside edge of one of the stiles will remain hidden in the door pocket, so I'm going to have the ends of the allthread exposed on that edge.
> 
> ...


An interesting solution.


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Preparing the bookmatched panel blanks*

It has been a long time since my last blog post. Sorry. I was more intent on getting the door done than writing about it.

At this point the stile and rail blanks are complete, so I turned to the panels.

One option was to make each panel the full thickness of the door - 1 3/4 inches - and raise the panel on each side. A second option is to make panels half the thickness of the door - 7/8 inches - raise the panel on 1 side, and use 2 panels back-to-back for each opening in the frame. For whatever reason, this second option appealed to me more than the first. Additionally, it was suggested by the instruction for the Amana entry door making router bit set that I used.

The blanks for the panels needed to be nearly 10" wide. Again, for whatever reason, it seemed like a good idea to make them from bookmatched glue-ups. Consequently, I started with 8/4 stock at least 5" wide. For each panel I cut 1 piece of stock a bit longer than the final panel length. Each piece was jointed on one face and planed to uniform thickness. I tried to retain as much thickness as possible on each piece, so the jointing and planing was enough to establish flat surfaces on both sides of each piece, but I did not remove all surface defects. Each piece was resawn in half to make two halves of a bookmatched pair. For each pair I decide which edges to glue. When I jointed the glued edges I ran the parts through the jointer so that the "top" of the board on one side of the joint and the "bottom" of the board on other side of the joint were against the jointer fence. This ensured that the boards would glue up flat even if my jointer fence was not exactly perpendicular to the jointer bed.

For glue up I used a pair of 4-way panel clamps from Peachtree. These clamps do a pretty good job keeping the panel aligned for glue up, but not quite as good as I wanted. Consequently I also used 3 clamps along the glue line to force the panels into alignment. Next time I have a bunch of panels to do, I may consider using this bit from Amana to ensure the panel parts stay precisely aligned. I also added several bar clamps (alternating above/below the panel) to apply even more pressure across the glue joint.

Once the panel blanks were glued up and dry they were too wide to flatten with my 6" jointer. I made a 12"x24" torsion box from melamine and clamped that in my planer to provide one long, flat bed. To flatten a panel blank I determined which side would rest on the torsion box with no wobbling, and then ran it through the planer with that side down taking a very light cut to flatten the top. Since the blanks were quite flat to start with except for some small offset at the glue line, this worked well enough. A number of light passes and each blank was flat and planed to uniform thickness. Again I tried to maintain as much thickness as possible, so I left surface imperfections on the back side of each blank.

At the end of all this I found that only a few of my blanks were going to finish out at a full 7/8" thickness. Instead I had to make due with panels that were only 13/16" thick.

A bit of a bummer that I don't have any pictures from this part of the process. But I will cheat and show you a couple of the finished panels from this forum topic that came a bit later in the process.


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## doordude (Mar 26, 2010)

GregD said:


> *Preparing the bookmatched panel blanks*
> 
> It has been a long time since my last blog post. Sorry. I was more intent on getting the door done than writing about it.
> 
> ...


you did a nice job with glue up and creating the hip design. hopefuly this is for interior use. typical interior panels are 7/8" 
to 1- 1/8" thick; but 3/4" will work great for your door. Don't forget, not to glue these panels in your stile and rails.


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## timjr (Aug 29, 2010)

GregD said:


> *Preparing the bookmatched panel blanks*
> 
> It has been a long time since my last blog post. Sorry. I was more intent on getting the door done than writing about it.
> 
> ...


those look great, what wood is that?


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

GregD said:


> *Preparing the bookmatched panel blanks*
> 
> It has been a long time since my last blog post. Sorry. I was more intent on getting the door done than writing about it.
> 
> ...


doordude: Thanks. Yes it is an interior door. My panels were in between - 13/16". One of my next posts will describe how I worked with that. No, didn't glue those in.

timjr: African mahogany. I think there are several different species that are sold as this; IDK exactly what I got. The panels in the pictures have 2 coats of Waterlox tung oil on them - no stain. Very rich color.


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## GregD (Oct 24, 2009)

*Really this time, milling the stiles and rails*

The last installment of this series was originally titled Milling the stiles and rails and described prepping the blanks for the panels. Sigh. Sorry about that. I've fixed that entry title.

This door would be for the passage between my foyer and formal living room, so I thought the best side should face the foyer. I inspected each blank for the stiles and rails and picked out the best side as the "foyer" side, marking each part with chalk to indicated what part it was, which side was the foyer side, and which edge was "up".

The blanks were fairly flat. The cores had been jointed and planed and the relatively thin skins were planed to uniform thickness before they were glued on. Nevertheless, I jointed one side of each blank. I also jointed a few pieces of 8/4 poplar about 5" wide and about a foot long. These were intended for making test cuts.

The widths of the middle and bottom rails were nominally 8" and 9" respectively - too wide for my 6" jointer. For these parts I used my planer. I've used 2 methods to do this. For one method, I made a torsion box sled 48" long and 12" wide. I fix the work to the top of the sled with a couple of dabs of hot melt glue and run them as a stack through the planer a couple of times taking light passes, jointing the top surface parallel to the flat bottom of the torsion box sled.

The second method which I think I like better, is to attach runners to the edges of the work. The runners are thin-ish strips of scrap that have been jointed on one edge. I put the work on my table saw top and attach each runner, jointed edge down so that the jointed edges of the runners are co-planar. The runners extend 3" beyond the ends of the work so they also eliminate any snipe when planing. I then run the assembly through the planer, taking a couple of light passes until the top is jointed to my satisfaction.

I then proceeded to thickness all the parts to a final thickness of 1-3/4". As I worked down in thickness from the rough thickness to the final thickness, each part was flipped as needed so that the final thicknesses of the skins on the part were approximately the same thickness. The poplar blanks were milled to this final thickness at the same time.

After thicknessing the parts were edge-jointed on the jointer, and finally ripped to final width on the table saw.

Pretty standard stuff.

I used a carefully calibrated cross cut sled to true up one end of each blank, and then to trim the other end to final length. It was probably silly to do, but I planned these cuts so that even if the sled was not precisely calibrated to 90 degrees, the parts would still come together at tight joints. I marked each corner that was against the fence when the corner was cut, and I planned the cuts so that once the parts were assembled in the door, these corners would be at the lower left and upper right of each part. The door would at least be a parallelogram even if it wasn't exactly square.

I had decided to use the Amana entry door making router bit set. Having never made a door before I decided the prudent thing to do was to make a small practice door. So I got some 8/4 poplar to use for this. Once I got it home, I remembered that I had parts leftover from the solid wood front door that was originally on my house. I replaced it because it leaked and eventually the bottom joints started to come apart. Nevertheless, I was able to mill up some of the remaining parts to provide all the blanks I needed. I took notes from this process and from that developed the procedure I would follow when milling the parts to the pocket door.

Here is a picture of the practice door:









I intended to follow the instructions provided with the entry door making router bit set, but I had to deal with the fact that the thickness of my panel blanks was going to come up shy of 1/2 the door thickness.

This set does not provide a cutter for the panel slots, and I bought the Timber Line Multi 3-Wing Slot Cutter Router Bit Set to handle whatever slots I was going to need. My panel blanks were going to plane out to 13/16", a bit less than 1/2 the thickness of the door ( 7/8" ). I considered separating each pair of back-to-back panels with a 1/8" thick spacer panel to compensate for the under-thickness panel blanks. Instead I decided to cut separate slots for each panel. In this case the slots would be 3/16" thick, and there would be a 1/8" strip separating them. I still have the poplar parts I used for test cuts. Here is a picture of one of them that is milled up as a rail and shows the panel slots.









I set up a slot cutter for 3/16" slot width. The bit height was adjusted so that the outside edges of the slots were 1/2" apart. That is, the total thickness of the 2 slots and the spacer between them was 1/2". With the poplar blanks I tested the setup and made sure that the mortising chisel fit exactly between the outside edges of the slots. On the test door I had gotten a bit of chip out when slotting (probably because I cut the slot in 1 pass) and I wanted to eliminate any chance of that happening. I used a sacrificial fence on my router table fence to provide zero clearance support for the cut. I also made the slots in two passes.

I laid out and then cut all the mortises. I used a mortising attachment on my drill press. I don't think this would have been possible with a typical benchtop mortiser because I had to cut mortises into the mid and lower rails that were 8" wide (or more). I don't think they would have fit. Another advantage of using a drill press is that you can use a very low rpm and minimize heating of the bit. I set the belts on my drill press for the lowest rpm.

The next step was to route the coping profile. The (flat) top of the bit is aligned with the outermost edge of the slots. For each cut I clamped a backing board to the work piece. I elevated my fence to be a bit higher than this so that the entire edge of the work was always fully in contact with the fence - there was no gap in the fence around the router bit. I cut this profile in 3 passes, adjusting the position of my fence for each pass. Consequently, I ran all the parts through the first pass, adjusted the fence, and then did the second pass.

The final step was to route the sticking profile. This was also done in 3 passes, but the bit height was changed between passes after aligning the fence with the bearing on the bit. I also elevated my fence on this cut so that it could be as close as possible to the bearing.

I had to do a lot of fine-tuning of each one of the mortises, widening them with a chisel. I deliberately set up the coping bit to leave the tenons just a smidgen thick just to be sure no joint came out loose. I went joint-by-joint, shaving the sides of the mortise until the tenon fit to my satisfaction - not quite so tight that I couldn't seat the joint without using a mallet.


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## dub560 (Jun 4, 2010)

GregD said:


> *Really this time, milling the stiles and rails*
> 
> The last installment of this series was originally titled Milling the stiles and rails and described prepping the blanks for the panels. Sigh. Sorry about that. I've fixed that entry title.
> 
> ...


Looking good…keep em coming


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