Sealing The Door - Log Cabin Maintenance

it is such a beautiful morning here on the homestead it just finally warmed up the snow is melting and it's our break a break in the weather this winter it has been so cold it's time to get some work done on the cabin uh while we have a chance while it's warmed up because it's going to get cold again we could work on any number of things chinking the window the roof i don't even want to talk about the roof and the the door is the thing to work on today this door was made in the summertime a year and a half ago and it is shrunk it's got giant gaps in it it doesn't close very well it doesn't have a latch system the snow just blows in and giant drifts so it is not working out so i'm going to be working on filling up the gaps of the door getting that door kind of tightened up and i'm going to be making the latch system for it a hand forged latch i love the look of the rustic wooden handle but we need something that will latch it we're going to make a custom hand forged handle just for this cabin [Music] so let's take a look at the door from the outside so we can get an idea of what our real problems are we got our gaps here between the boards on the internal section here this um this is actually pretty easy only i can't quite fit my fingers through these gaps and they're pretty regular this should be easy to do it's going to get a lot harder uh here on the outside edges we got i mean i can fit my whole hand in there right there so that's this is going to be the biggest problem area the rest of it isn't fitting too bad i mean we'll take a little bit of fixing around there normally i would probably just fix these with boards the problem is is if we put wood in between these gaps and summertime comes around this wood's going to expand and this door won't shed at all or it'll shut and we'll never get it open so we want something that can give a little bit so we're not going to use sticks i think i've got another solution for that the latch that we are going to be hand forging today for the cabin is a common 18th century system called the suffolk latch and it comprises of the handle that goes on the outside of the door then it'll have a little thumb piece on the outside that you'll depress to lift the bar on the inside that bar will catch the latch on the inside and it will have five pieces plus the nails that we will be making also to install this latch on our cabin so we've got our decorative end on our handle here this is the main main piece and we're going to drift a hole for a nail right about here [Music] here we go so we have our nail hole punched now these two holes here i'm going to cut through them so it'll make a slot then this piece is going to go through and that will be our thumb lever for the latch on the inside so we have our top piece of our handle latch system with our two nail holes and then the slot for the the thumb lever we've got a 90 degree angle now we're going to bend a curve just for the handle and then bring it down with the nail on the bottom side just make it a little little decorative [Music] so to seal this door up i'm actually going to use a technique kind of taken from shipbuilding and boat building of the 18th century and that is using the caulking of seams just like they would have done on a ship so we've got a rope here that i can either leave in its full thickness form that's about a half inch thick which probably will work really good for those internal door gaps and if i need to have thinner pieces i can just un unreave the the rope here and then i'll have thinner parts for around the outside edge if i have parts that i you know don't don't need that full thickness we've got the rope and this is a hemp rope that's i mean basically you're going to use worn out rope you don't want to use brand new stuff and then in the pot here i've got a pine tar which we will soak that rope in and that will give us a waterproof seal and it'll really kind of keep it in place if we didn't use the tar it would probably work all right but it would weather quickly and probably just fall right out of the gap so this tar will kind of stick it right in place so i'm just going to pound this stuff into the seams and again the nice part is it's going to give as that door expands this clock will give way and it will squeeze even tighter and work even better if the door squeezes up and not make the door swell up so that it won't fit so before i can get the tar to work with this rope i need to heat it up for as cold as it is this is a thin pine tar but i want it to soak into this rope so i'm going to heat it up by the fire something i got to be really careful of this is very flammable stuff so you know i'm going to be obviously very careful as i put it over the fire i won't get it bubbling boiling hot it is so dangerous that on board ship they would use special means to heat this up they would use logger heads that would heat up metal and then put it into the pot we're going to use this on coals [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] so here we have our finished our finished handle looks good top and bottom match we've got our holes for our thumb thumb lever for the inside part of the latch and all our nail holes the very final step is a coating of beeswax that'll help keep it from rusting it'll make it look really good too the next step is to make the thumb lever that will go through the door and actually operate the latch on the [Music] inside so we have our handle our thumb lever and then the bar on the inside that'll actually catch the latch and that's the part that we need to make next here's the door back on its hinges and uh our caulking looks really good here now that we're we still have some little gapping but that's all right as this door swells up as soon as it's not this dry it'll probably squeeze that up a little tighter and our gaps will disappear i'm not too worried about that and if i really need to i can drive even more rope in there even as it's on its hinges so i'm really not too worried about that i was thinking about how the rope would go around the exterior and there's just no gap on this side for it to happen at all and even on this back side of the hinge side of the door this gap is so big the the rope isn't going to work for that so i am going to create a small piece of wood that will fill in it will still leave a little bit of a gap but we're going to fill this worst part in with wood [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so so the door is looking good and sealed up at least compared to where it started how's the how's the handle going the handle's good i've got all the parts made this is the exterior portion of the handle latch system and we're going to start by actually installing the latch on the inside and get all those parts set and then we'll know the placement of the exterior handle [Music] [Music] [Music] the door is so much better than it was it took all day long you know i worked on sealing that up and it's just amazing the the amount of difference there is uh you know working with that tar getting it all hot and then you soak that rope and everything squeezed up so there was a lot to learn about the process of getting it to work on that door and the latch yeah the latch that was another learning process that latch was made custom for that door and i learned once you have all the parts made you have a lot of final fitting to get it to work for that door thank you so much brandon that latch looks great and it is it is great to be able to come out to the cabin and the whole homestead really we can work in the blacksmith shop working on particular tools or working on the latch itself go to the wood shop area work on different wood pieces that we need all of this whole homestead interlocks together everything works together so that we can continue to build this up and i mean that's really the the best part of this project it all hooks together i want to thank you for coming along with us today on this homestead project thanks for watching

Channel: Townsends

Views: 162,533

Rating: 4.9778457 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking

Id: sjzWYB3kefk

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021

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[u/LazyTurtleDelta]

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