Door Making Episode 1 | Paul Sellers

I want to walk you through the steps to making a door we're actually going to make a door but and there's going to be some pretty strong emphasis on certain elements that go into making a door and that's what I plan on talking with you about during this aspect of the video because it's so critical that what I'm going to talk about are elements that are so critical to making a twist free door by hand it's much easier by machine because everything is passed through the machine you've got guaranteed parallelism you've got all kinds of features that are perfected that way but we can do the same with hand tools as long as you accept certain conditions and that you have to do certain things so I'm going to make a door that goes with this cabinet I've already made one twist free door as far as it's possible whether it's by machine or hand this door has zero twists in it and it's made to size I've got the horses on here these need to be cut off but when I offer this to the cabinet it's got no twist in it so when I hang this door why is it so important that this has to be twist free this back panel here has the same construction method this panel down inside here has the same identical construction method these didn't matter so much as the door why is that well the reason is that this is constrained the back panel is constrained because it's screwed from the back into the frame and the superstructure of the frame constrains it this is constrained by joinery it's got joints that make sure it's completely twist three the whole cabinet is twist free but with the door once this is hung on here it just has to fix point there is nothing to stop the cabinet door from twisting so we need to start out with twist free materials so the emphasis first of all is that you have materials that are dried down to somewhere if possible between seven and 12 percent that will give you a material that will be very stable so it's no longer absorbing moisture it's no longer releasing moisture or at least it's been minimized and the wood has been seasoned and it's ready for use can you see now I've got my face mark on here face edge on here that means that I have straightened the wood I've taken out any twists I've checked it for twists by using winding sticks like this to make sure that the piece of wood is completely twist free i milled this yesterday hand planed it yesterday I got everything ready yesterday and now left it overnight and I checked it again this morning to make sure no twists occurred because of atmospheric changes or changes in the wood so I've checked the edges for square these have to be dead square if when you make a mortise hole and you put shoulders on your Tenons the shoulders or the mortise edge is not dead square then you can actually clamp twists into the door so these have to be dead square this has to be dead straight there should be nothing in this when you put the two faces together like this when you put a clump on this one end here the other end should be can you see how we closed up on there and there's no gap in there there's no gap in here and this is perfect for what I want for my cabinet what we're going to do now is set those aside those are ready for the tenon so I've already checked those I'm going to do the same on this one and I already have checked this I've checked this one has no twists in it I checked it with the winding sticks when I put the winding sticks on this piece however and I've already made my face mark on here I've got my edge squared and everything I noticed that when I went back in on this one and checked this one again let me go this way like this that I have checked this and I can see that there is a twist in here so I go down here and I can see that this point is high or this point is high it doesn't matter which they're both showing a twist now remember when we talked about twist it looks a lot but it's not this watch this now I check this one two three four five almost six times so the twist is exaggerated almost six times that's a lot so I don't have to worry too much but what I want to show is when I put these two faces together and this is a good way of checking for twist I'm going to do the clamp on the end again here put the clamp on and then I'm going to look at the other end so clamp here so that should it's not actually there I don't know whether you can see but can you see that the bottom is closed at the bottom it's closed and there is a gap right at the very top there but it's not even the thickness of a piece of paper it's even a fraction of a piece of paper if I put a feeler gauge in there it's very very tiny that gap but that gap is enough to be exaggerated the width of the door so however many times this and then you have the width of the door which is 15 inches so however many times this divides into this will be the amount of twist you're building into the door so you have to get rid of all the twists before you start laying out and chopping your mortises so this may seem like an over exaggeration but it's not so I know that this point is high or this point is high so I'm just going to take a couple of shavings and that's all it's going to be so I set my I might go with a longer plane although a short one will work just fine and I'm going to zero out my plane iron here so I'm taking no shaving and I'm going to advance that wheel an eighth of a turn till it takes a shaving keep going there it is so that's my shaving now I know I'm somewhere around a thousand so I've got a little slither of wood here so here this side should be taking a shaving which it is this size taking none so I'm going to advance this again and just I'm just going to check this for parallel here until I get a shaving that is thick enough and parallel to the edge I'm good to go I think that's too much that's exactly about the amount the whole amount that I want to remove can you believe that's probably all that I want to get from the surface of this wood to guarantee I'm parallel so it was very very small amount I want it dead on and that's what I have right now maybe one more there and that's it that's all I'm going to I'm going to rest my case on that do my assessment and check because everything lines up with this face when I use my you'll watch how I make the mortise guide for this or I use a mortise going on this so my wood is prepared I'm going to check the edge again see in theory the theory did change that edge as well so I'm taking off a shaving on this edge here just to bring me to square so now I'm square and you see inside there so I am sure because this is important this is where the shoulders of the tenon come together on those two face on those two outer edges here and here so they have to be square so now this is ready now check these two faces here along this edge here to make sure these are also together and they're good as well so I'm ready to make my door what we're going to do is make a frame just like this one here where we've run the groove inside edge this one happens to be centered sometimes they're not centered sometimes they're offset one side or the other I want mine centered it's going to have a panel in here so that's what my first step in making this door is going to be and once I've run my grooves I can run the joinery layout here so I've got my face mark here face edge so I'm going to start with my plow plane which is already set because I just made that door so this is centered in the middle you start at one end here take very light passes pressing laterally into the face checking the surface to make sure if you were running against the grain there you could set a gauge like this and you can you can micro adjust this to that groove and you might want to do that anyway but just set a gauge line like this and a marking gauge or a cutting gauge will work just fine - and you can run the gauge line along this surface here and that will cut a wall and stop the fibers on the important edge from lifting if you don't want to do that or you don't have a gauge to do that you can watch the fibers tear and they will only tear on the surface and then you can go in with a plain shaving afterwards and take it down 1/32 of an inch it just means your door will be slightly undersized so I'm running a gauge line here to stop those fibres this will cut the surface fibres and hopefully prevent the fibres from tearing upwards that's that alright what else have I got to do now I've got to get the size of the door I have to know the size of the door but I can run my grooves in here first and get those settles so I'll do that and then we'll go back to the cabinet to see how about how do we size these things so don't take two deeper cut if you work backwards from the edge see I'm going into the end grain here but the surface fibers are not tearing what's tearing is in the bottom of the groove this is the nature of this particular species of wood this is sapele and this does surface tear right here I'm going against the grain because this is centered in the theory of everything I could work to this edge here but the reason I don't is because I used the true face here and I have to run everything to this face here with the face mark so I'm going to stay with that and just keep working down work backwards like this and eventually you won't even notice that you're going against the grain this groove is quarter of an inch deep if you've got a little friction in there which I do oil in a can is three and one oil just some white machine oil on the rag makes a huge difference there I'm down so now I'm pretty much down to the bottom of the groove and that's that so there is my groove in one I do the same in this one the same in my rails let me just check see how the grain runs well doesn't look good but yeah that definitely is against the grain so I'm going to run a groove I mean a gauge line here again a regular marking gauge will do the same just because this one has a cutting wheel or a cutting disk it's not really a wheel work both sides it's just an extra precaution really and you know what you can do too if you're really worried about it you can actually go in there with your marking knife your layout knife and pull that along there so this is going about three or four times deeper than that then that gage line went just pulling back off track a little bit there go down and you can actually go back in after you've gone down two or three shavings and deepen this with the knife if you feel it's necessary if it's not necessary don't do it but this works well these are just little tricks of the trade really and if this was for an inlay maybe you were doing a walnut inlay or something this is a good way to deal with that too don't spill your coffee okay here we go so I've got quite a deep cut there but look no tear out run down to depth now moving back no tear out out on the on the fibers that matter so that's really how we run grooves for raised panels just flat panels even for glazing sometimes make sure you go all the way down to your depths of quarter of an inch this shoe is what stops it here and there I am down so that's the second piece done these are my rails you can see what happens when it's crisp and with the grain in your favor the edges are much neater very nice crisp lines again see what happens with this against the grain just before I do any real cutting deal with it this way and you can even run a saw down there how do you do that if you just take a tenon saw right on these inside guidelines you can go in with your knife here make a cut like this peel out that wall can you see that Phill just like that and then you can run a tenon saw down that wall like this little tricks of the trade once you're in the groove like this you're good to go do the same on this side a little tricks of the trade that make life so much easier for us where are you so this one wasn't quite so easy as you thought here we go and run a groove like that that will just guarantee you have no tear out just for the first few strokes you can actually go all the way along then you can actually chisel out a full groove if you wanted to watch this now so that works perfectly there you have it all the grooving is done you can see in the bottom of the groove it's torn but the walls are crisp and clean and that's the way we do it when it comes to sizing the door if you're making a cabinet like I'm making this cabinet here this cabinet is going to have two doors in it but you use the same procedure whether you have two or one door I have a cabinet that's 50 or 30 and a quarter wide so my doors are 15 and 1/8 of an inch wide and then the height is the distance I have left on a half an inch here 12 millimeters here 12 millimeters here I have left this is called a this is a different kind of a haunch or a horn sometimes it's called the reason we do this is because it's much easier to make the door if you're not worried about damaging the corners as you move it around picking it up putting it down in the bench on the vise things like that this protects the top edge of the door but it's also preferable to leave it extended like this once you've made the door once you've glued it up got your panels in and everything you simply go along with a knife wall all the way around these faces sawed it off stand it up in the vise and then plane it flush with the long edge you have this long reference face otherwise if you cut these to length and then you have to make this perfectly match the extension of it the extreme end of the style and that's harder to do when you're using hand methods so these are all methods that have been developed through the years and they really work I'm going to make this door this next door the same size as this but what I've done on this door is I have actually made this door should be 15 and 1/8 I've actually made it just over 15 and 1/8 I've made it 15 and a quarter so that means that when I hang the door I'll take a sixteenth off this side the sixteenth off this side fitting that to the cabinet first and then I will fit the meeting edge of the door and the same with the height I've actually made my cabinet door 1/8 of an inch taller so I'm going to take a sixteenth off here a sixteenth off here but when it comes to fitting I fit the style and then I fit the top of the rail so it fits exactly to the cabinet just in case there is a discrepancy we're hand making this so we're going to make the door the opening for the door in this case literally case mine should be thirty and a half thirty and 9/16 and I actually have thirty and eleven sixteenths can you see there so I've made it longer and I'm fully prepared to plane this down you can make it to a tighter tolerance if you wish that's entirely up to you you can make it make it exactly to size if you wish but you do have to factor in some details that this will need fitting so I'm going to work to this existing door because I want the two doors to be exactly the same size just for simplicity if for no other reason so I'm going to start with the inside of the rail here and I'm going to just make a mark across the two rail so I flush this end up I've got this tight on the inside corner and I'm going across this inside face here and I'm forgetting the extreme I'm not going to worry about that at this point and I do the same in here go across the two Stiles where they enter where they meet on those inside faces like that or not quite like that they see if I can squeeze here yeah so just a small knife mark across the two that's just a registration line get rid of this door now those marks are not so critical but I am going to emphasize them did I move I did so I'm going to go across both pieces here can you see here Phil if I go here go across here and don't do as I do who said that you could clump these together I'm really avoiding movement but it's not easy I'm trying to make this expeditious because of the camera that's that one same on this one so I'm orienting this for the convenience of my hands and across these two here there now depending on which one I've chosen for the top so I'm going to break these apart because I already have these marked with my triangle here so that's my top rail there so I can bring these together line up my registration lines and then I'm going to put my top rail arm here so this is the top across those two lines I make a mark here that's the extreme of my top rail that's the very top rail and then I'm going to measure down three quarters of an inch from the top rail like that so this is actually going to be the position of my mortise hole there and then if you can see inside here let's give you a sharp edge there I put this just over hanging so it's on this side of the style and I flush this inside edge which is going to be the exact position that I want for this rail to meet this style here and I'm just going to make a pencil line right in here because I can't get a knife in and that gives me the position of this part which is actually going to form the tenon so the hole the hole is quarter of an inch less than that shoulder line I think I'm going to use the knife and I have to use the knife on this top edge it's fine to do that so here I'll show you what I have in a minute can you see there Phill so this will be the actual mortise hole this will be the top line of the door this is the half inch horn that will be cut off after this forms the groove to receive the panel so I do the same at this end but remember my bottom rail is wider than my top rail so I've got two and a half inch top rail and a three and a half inch bottom rail this goes on here is the extreme of my door and I'm going to do the same I'm going to measure up three-quarters of an inch but actually I could measure down from this rail quarter of an inch because I know that's the exact depth of my groove there's the extreme of my mortise hole to extremes and now we chop the mortises now then this is where using this system that I'm going to show you this is why the outside faces were so critically important they had to be dead flat without any twists in them I wouldn't be too worried if it was bold this way particularly these are actually pretty close can you see there's a slight gap in the mid section there that gap is probably a millimeter at the most would I worry about that I really wouldn't because the other door may be bold exactly the same way such a short just a small bow wouldn't matter but that could also be on the style of the door where I'm going to use three hinges in this case so I can actually pull that in when I pu t the door in if it bothered me probably would not bother me it probably would not even show and the truth is that both of these could be if that's a millimeter then and both of these are bowed the same way then that could mean that it's only half a millimeter difference so don't sweat issues like that at this stage so I'm going to chop a mortise in between those two lines I already have a guide block this one is the same distance so I have a quarter inch mortise hole 3/8 in from each side so I've made this guide here you don't have to have the brass on if you're only doing a twenty holes you can just use wood you don't need the brass on I keep these as regular features because usually the holes are quarter of an inch 3/8 half an inch from the edge so I just keep some of these around this is just parallel to this surface this is 3/8 so this goes on to this face mark here and it aligns with the inside edge perfectly of the inside face of the groove that I've cut so I can use this now as my reference face when I chop the quarter inch hole into here I line it up here I pull it to the surface of that brass plate which could be wood in your case and that gives me a perfectly aligned mortise hole and as long as I register on this face it means that the mortise hole is also parallel to this outside faith it's very important this system is one that I developed and I've used it through a long time for many decades now and I think a lot of other people are using it and have adopted it as a result of my first efforts there which is what it was all about is trying to make woodworking real for everybody the reason I'm working to this outside face is let me just give you a quick glimpse here see can you see this is flush on this outside face perfectly flush can you see the discrepancy I have allowed here I'm working to the true historic methods that we would have used a hundred years ago when we're making doors by hand we work to a true outside face aligned all the Tenon's and everything the mortise holes to the outside face when we finish the door we take this face and we plane this down to this one because it didn't really matter whether the doors were perfectly aligned on the inside we do still flush it like in this case here is my outside face I still have my face marks on all these surfaces these surfaces are all perfectly aligned after I had finished the project got the door together just clamped not glued I went in and I planed all these surfaces and this gives me as good a face as anybody could ever get with a machine or whatever it works perfectly the whole system worked and we're just using that system because we're not mass manufacturing doors we're just making one two three or four doors and the system works perfectly for that so I'm going to chop my first hole can you see these lines let me pencil this in so you can see here this is the inside mortise hole is going between here this is the extreme of my piece of wood so this would be the small top rail going here so I'm going to go right on that line first line I'm going to chop just gently just to get a cut line and then I'm going about 3/16 away and I start to lever can you see so that first piece hood then I go back into my cut line and I go deeper but I don't hit very hard cut don't want to move that knife wall then I move along another eighth of an inch and I just keep levering out out that way so now I'm down already quarter of an inch I'm only going about an inch and three eighths in this case then I move along again another eight of an inch so now I've moved along 3/8 of an inch and actually I have gone down 3/8 of an inch so already I have progressed my mortise hole way down in here so the more I do this the deeper I go so here can you see I'm right in there keep the chisel perpendicular and the bevel go until you hear that dead sound this was going to choo choo choo choo dehh. Now I got the dead sound. jerk out your chisel back up about halfway and just lever out some of this waste here go a little bit deeper and this waste is just going to pop out turn the chisel round bevel against the wall down into the bottom and leave her out the waste and you don't need to damage this top rim of the mortise hole at all so I'm going to go down yet again and now I'll move across again lever out some of the waste and go deeper move along now we can lever freely without having to worry too much so I'm getting close to depth I'm already over an inch deep and see how these come out very uniformly now back up don't bend your chisel I'm only using a 1/4 inch bevel edge chisel which i think is great I have almost no resistance so now I'm on the extreme of the hole take out your waste can you see we're taking off these little tiny amounts an eighth of an inch at the very most but it goes full depth so if I check my depth now from here to here I am already down an inch and almost an inch and 1/8 so I only have another quarter of an inch to go down turn the chisel around right on the knife wall well it's not really a knife all this time but can you see I'm aligning my chisel here make sure it registers there pull away and then work towards perpendicular incrementally and now I'm on the last one that's the extreme of my holding i turn my chisel around go about a third of the way along with the chisel with the bevel perpendicular this time lever and lever and I am already down to depth now in two passes I'm not trying to lift the waste because it's not worth it I'll show you in a minute that sounded a little bit of a heavy cut to me I probably should have backed off a little bit I'm down to depth or very close to get rid of this tap out some of the waste anchor in the vise and go with a narrower chisel I happen to have a 3/16 chisel here go down into the hole with the 3/16 and just separate those pieces of fiber from the main body of the mortise and lift those out I'm not actually I'm just removing what's been wedged apart really and then we'll check the depth because from here we are one-on- 1/8 I think there we are we're right on one on 1/8 just over so I can go I can use the wall itself now to guide that extra depth and that's how we chop the main body of the mortise hole we have one more step after this now I know this wall is parallel to the main reference face which is this face so it's exactly where I wanted it to be those bottom fibers can be a little more difficult to get out down below but now I'm to depth again I go in with the narrower chisel try not to drag your chisel on the bottom it will dull your chisel very quickly if you do that not always possible to avoid it and that gets us where we need to be and that is almost ready for the tenon try not to break your chisel they will break if you're not careful and not sensitive I've never broken a chisel but once I can remember there is my final depth I need one and three-eighths can you see that I'm dead on one 3/8 I would leave it at that I'd rather take a tenon down 1/16 and fiddle around that is going to work though so I have one more step in this perfecting of the actually that's probably taking me down a 16th over it should be great can you see inside there Phill nice clean-cut mortise hole I'm very happy that it is parallel to the outside face take the guide and place it on the shoulder line clamp it in and then take a wider chisel 1-inch works perfectly 3/4 and see this I'm just going to pare down that inside face like that and that is all I'm going to do for now it really lined up perfectly and when you see I think the wall on this outside face hardly took anything out there can you see right down in there it's as smooth as the outside face after I planed it pretty much that's how we chop a mortise so now we have all the others are done the same way and then we'll fit the tenors and I'll show you how we do that it just struck me that I had a pre-existing frame and cabinet that I was working to if you were starting to lay out a cabinet door from scratch and this is the general procedure you start with a piece of wood generally you make it longer than the opening and I think a pretty standard measurement when I was growing up was to make it one inch longer that meant you could measure down half an inch up half an inch so in this case I have a cabinet let's say this was 36 inches I would make these Stiles 37 inches and I would measure down half an inch from the top so this is actually the inside of the frame and then I would take my top rail and I would mark the position of the top rail I measure up half an inch from the bottom like that and then I add my bottom rail to there so this gets the exact height of the cabinet square those lines across like that that gives the exact position of the rail the top and bottom rail there and there then I line up I've got a groove in here you will probably already have your groove in there too line this up with the bottom of that pencil line can you see right into here I've got that lined up with the bottom there and then I marked this position here this will show the extreme of the mortise hole and then do the same at the bottom as well so you come back up from that extreme width line go across these two surfaces in this case I'm making a three quarter inch horn so I come down from the top line here like that and this then this here is the exact size of the mortise hole do the same on the bottom one place this on the line mark in the bottom or reverse it and place the groove on the whatever way you do it's going to give you a quarter inch line square across the two like that measure up three quarters of an inch and that means that your tenon will be completely and closed within this area there is your mortise hole there is your mortise hole run your grooves or whatever or run your gauge lines you may want to use a mortise gate to line up your mortise holes and cut your holes first if you're not using a groove if you're not using rebates you would do that you could use planted rebates which means you nail on strips to form the rebates there are different procedures but that's the basic layout for the rails we do the rails the same either way what we want for the rails we want the overall width so let me take these these are pieces that I've already been working on the overall width of my door in this case is going to be 15 and 3/16 so I'm going to place these 15 and 3/16 apart like that so I've got the exact overall width that I want my door to finish at. You can take this off your drawing you can do this in different ways there is my shoulder line my shoulder line between the two is 10 and 1/16 so I Center that in here I've already cut these to length I got 1 and 3/8 one and 3/8 but just to show you I'm going to go half of my... I've got 11 inches so that six and a half in.. five and a half...no... I've got 13 six and a half inches here and I wanted 10 and 3/16 in between so I'm going to go five and three thirty-seconds that gives me the shoulder line that I want there so I should have one and three-eighths which is what I've got so I've got my shoulder line there I'm going to go with a pencil just initially to give me good visual now here I'm going to go in between 10 and 3/16 square that line across now put these two together so whether you've got grooves in or not this would be the same procedure and those are my shoulder lines and now I'm going with my knife I go across right onto that pencil line like that I missed one there and the same on this one here and that gives me that in my case that's giving me my 1 and 3/8 long tenon and from here I register on that inside face the one that's proven with my knife wall that's giving me exactly the shoulder line I need and these must be perfect they have to be exact so all the time I'm registering my square against one face one registration face or the other you can go right across these this as well because this actually will more than likely be removed in the planing and fitting of the door same on the bottom rail exactly the same so this is my tenon piece and then I can use a mortis gauge to lay out for the tenon so I do the same on this piece and that's how you establish your exact cut line so they're identical all the way through these are exactly the same you have exactly equi distance on both pieces on the top rail bottom rail and the Stiles and that helps you make a perfectly square doorframe door should i say

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 202,501

Rating: 4.942358 out of 5

Keywords: Woodworking, Hand Tools, Door Making, Paul Sellers, Door

Id: 7BhshbSmtgE

Length: 47min 55sec (2875 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2016