Why So Expensive??? Insider Guide to Deep Mortising Pocket Door Hardware

hey what's up guys welcome back to the channel doing some higher end door hardware installation this has become a standard for me uh on a lot of the homes I do on pocket doors we use this deeply recessed mortis Hardware requires a special machine it can be very intimidating if you haven't done this before you screw it up you screw up the door and if you screw it up you might not find out that you screwed it up until you're installing Hardware on the final so I wanted to make this video show you how to do this the tools you need some of the things you want to avoid and some tips to make you more productive along the way real quick let's go over some of the tools and Hardware you're going to want for this install first off as you see here I've got my door Buck you're going to want to have the doors securely in the vertical position in order to mount our mortising machine on it here now this is a porter cable 513 lock mortiser pretty much the industry standard if you're going to want to get into higher end Hardware this is probably going to be the machine that you want now I'm going to list all of the tools here on the side of the screen that you want for this kit I find it's best to create kits around the tools the installs that I'm doing so a lot of these I keep together all the time and then whenever I start a new house I've got everything together but obviously some of these things like a drill and a blower jigsaw I pull out each time I need it so just going across here some of the basic stuff blower you'll see why we need that in a few seconds it gets very very dusty safety glasses also are crucial jigsaw drill a spade bit two different routers one is going to be just a cordless router with a oversized guide bushing you'll see that in a little bit as well and then a half inch up cut bit with a 5 8 guide bushing those are going to be used with our templaco template here if you're getting in to this mtech Hardware which we have over here I highly suggest that you buy a templateco template they're expensive at first but they pay dividends if you're going to do much of this Hardware really makes the process go a lot more smoothly and it's very accurate also one other key Point whenever you're going to be having this mortise Hardware try to get the hardware on site when you're going to be doing your trim install now I've been doing so much of this that I actually just purchased my own set of the mtech Modern Hardware that way I have it all the time so and the key thing that I want with that is to be able to get the thicknesses of the hardware and just make sure everything is working good all the time if you don't have the hardware you can use the the sketch that comes you can get this off the internet or it comes in the door hardware box I've saved one or two of these in my kit but it's a little more risky a little bit more reassuring to be able to set your routers up to the proper depth if you've got your Hardware in hand now in terms of the overall setup it's nice to do all of this in one area reason being it's going to get very messy number one one and number two you do have a lot of different tools that you're using so if we can keep our work area confined to one space it's going to be more efficient as you see here I have two doors that are an inch and three eighths thick these are going upstairs but then over here I've got seven doors that are going to be a full inch and three quarter thick these are eight foot doors they will be going uh on the main level I did have to prep all of these doors in advance you'll see we've got raw wood on the edge here these doors come beveled so I ripped that bevel off with a track saw sanded them and got them prepped and ready to be mortise now a door Buck is really critical for this install I can't tell you how many times though I've actually forgot this and I've got to the job site and realized I didn't have it very easy just to make one up on site with some scrap material this one I try and keep around it's set up for inch and three quarter doors so it's a little bit wider than an inch and three quarter space here obviously here if you look on the gap on the side this is an inch and 3 8 door I still just go ahead and use it I'll just take some shims and kind of put them in the side and that locks the door in place securely so it works for both inch and 3 8 and inch and three quarter doors to start this whole process we'll be putting the mortiser on the door this is a big heavy machine it clamps onto the door using these crank clamps like so so the first thing that we got to do is figure out the height that we want to make our mortise I do this enough that I know I actually just write the height to the top of my mortiser on the top of the machine so every time I know exactly where to put it so I know for me 43 and a half inches to the top of this I've made a mark at 43 and a half inches from the bottom of the door I've also made a mark in the center of the door right here so then we'll just go on here and this just cranks and clamps right on to the edge of the door like so and it really holds itself in place pretty well now you'll notice right here I've got a center mark on my mortiser I also Mark the center of the door right there the reason is whenever you put this in place it's easy to get at least for mine it's easy to get it off center so you notice here the marks are off a solid sixteenth of an inch if I leave this here my mortise will be off a 16th and so I have found that if I hold it in place in the center where my two marks are lined up and then clamp it down it'll be perfect but that's something you want to watch out for because if you don't and you just slap this thing on it's off center quite a bit I've also found that I do need to pay attention to the bottom as well I'd be curious for you guys that do this a lot and have your own machines if yours have some slop in them I don't know if that's normal or not but mine definitely does it's something I have to watch out for to make sure it's lining up on Center once we've got our mortiser clamped on here we're basically ready to go this is an intimidating machine you turn it on and it really rumbles it's got a super long spindle it's kind of a violent machine so just be prepared for that once it's on we'll crank up and down and as you can see it raises and lowers and goes in at the same time so it's just a matter of cranking and cranking until we're all the way in we have a stop down here and you'll notice as we're mortising this stop will go further and further in and I know I'm at full depth whenever I make contact over here I'm not going to get into the full setup of this machine in this video I'm just going to show kind of the overall process in regards to this you will notice I've got a blower in my hand this thing shoots a ton of sawdust out at you make sure you've got your safety glasses on otherwise you'll end with your end up with your eyes full of junk I have found that if I point a blower like this down at the same time it just kind of directs everything away from me and keeps a lot more of the sawdust off of me also make sure you get your hearing protection in because this is a really loud machine okay time to rock and roll this lever down here engages the machine so that it goes in turn it on [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] I do recommend unplugging it once you're done just so you don't accidentally hit this toggle switch and turn it on when you're moving it around and then this little lever down here we're going to turn and that disengages it so that it can be pulled out whenever this lever is engaged you can't pull it back so moving that over allows us to pull it out and then just real quick loosen our clamps and pull it off now as you can see guys we've got one large deep mortise that was basically step one of the operation but we want to get to this point where we've also mortised here for our plate across the front as well as our through mortise through the door so that our Hardware can go in there that is where we want to use this template go template it's going to slide right over the door and allow us to do that so what I do at this point is we need to get the height position on here there is a decent sized space so I find what works best what I find works best is to just cut a block about 5 8 thick of one by I'm going to make a pencil mark across the top and it makes it just a little bit easier to Center the template because I'm lining this block up with the top and bottom edge of my mortise so now I've got two lines there that are offset and then whenever I go to install this template I can see my pencil lines here and I make those equidistant and get it centered on here I find that these Kreg Auto Max clamps work pretty good for clamping it in place just lock it down there one on the bottom and then one on top as well one quick note this is a problem that I encounter fairly often and it's that the mortise is not quite centered exactly after I do this whole operation that's why I was really trying to get it perfect for some reason it still didn't Center quite right but on the mtech literature they recommend a 11 16 wide mortise right here now the cutter that I have on mine is actually three-quarter so it's oversized by a sixteenth of an inch I find that's really helpful because it gives you a little bit of extra space in case that mortise is off it doesn't cause the hardware to malfunction at this point we're ready to Route our mortise for our plate here it doesn't really matter you can do your through mortise first or this plate makes no difference but our goal is to be able to put this in and have everything come out nice and flush I actually have this upside down that doesn't help anything but we want to get this so that it finishes out with our plate just being slightly past flush with the edge of the door so that's the next step of this operation we're clamped on here what I've found there's two different options that you have for bits this template is you is set up to be used with a half inch cutter and a 5 8 guide bushing so here I've got this router set up with a 5 8 guide bushing and a half inch mortising bit you can do that no big deal there's one problem with that if your guide bushing is not perfectly centered on your router bit it throws everything off and what you absolutely don't want to do is be turning the router as you go around because that would actually make the the mortise wider than it should be so what I actually prefer to do is take the struggle out of the whole thing and I use these uh White side bits and what they do is they've got a guide bearing on it that is 5 8 which is matching to what our typical 5 8 guide bushing would be and then it's got a half inch cutter head so this is an awesome bit I've got a bunch of these laying around I use them all the time and they're perfect for this kind of situation the only thing is you just want to be a little bit more careful with it because you don't have as much protection over the bit as you do with a guide bushing like this so you want to make sure you're not pulling the router out or putting it in with the bit spinning because that might gouge the side of your template so again to start out we want to make sure our bit is inside the mortise before we turn the router on foreign [Music] our next step is going to be to Route out this through plate section on both sides there's a lot of different ways you can do this you could actually even pencil this out cut it out with a the whole thing with the jigsaw I like to have that clean crisp routered look that looks really professional so I hog out most of it and then I finish it up with the router I've made the mistake in the past of getting way too greedy with the router and just what basically what I did was I would drill a hole stick the router in and then go around the problem is you end up with that big piece floating around in there the router grabs a hold of it and it just completely destroys your guide bushing in the bit and it's a disaster so you don't want to do that what I've found seems to work pretty good for me is I just take an inch and a half spade bit I drill two holes top and bottom connect the sides with the jigsaw which removes most of the material and then I hog out the rest with the router all right foreign [Music] [Music] okay so we're all done with our templaco template now I've got one more trick I'm going to show you with this template that just makes it even more handy in a second but I wanted to just sum up a couple things with the routers it's best to have two routers set up for this task obviously uh just takes a small compact router to do the plate on the front here I do kind of like having a larger router to hog out the the material over here it's just got plenty of power and it's easy to use could probably use a compact router if I wanted to but I've got this laying around anyways one thing I didn't touch on was how to set your depth on your router here for this plate I will say I normally always bring my plunge router that go my plunge base that goes with this router makes it so much easier for setting the correct depth for your plates like this I didn't have it today and I remembered how much of a pain it is to set depth without a plunge base so unfortunately I don't have it so I can't show you how to do that but I do recommend a plunge base for your compact router I mentioned earlier that it's worth the money to purchase the templaco template for these mortises I'm going to show you one of the key reasons for that and one of the things I love about this template here on this house I've got both inch and three quarter and inch and 3 8 thick doors that means you've got to move your template and adjust for those different thicknesses sure you could have two different templates that would be fine but it's just more space let me show you how to adjust this it's really cool how you do it so with this template it's adjustable as you can see here the sides go in and out and you tighten it down with just Phillips screws on the side but it's really cool what they've done is they've routed a mortise on the inside of the template and this one here is an inch and 3 8 wide and this one here is an inch and three quarters wide so whenever you're setting up for inch and three quarter doors you're just going to line up the inside edge of your template with that edge there and then the edge right here when you want to move to inch and 3 8 doors you'll move them in so they're like so so really cool way to quickly Center your sides and get everything aligned just a really impressive template overall okay everything is done there's one more tiny detail that I like to do we've obviously got rounded corners on our mortise here it's nice to get those squared off at this point that way whenever they paint them all the edges get painted if you wait to square the corners off until after paint you have raw wood then and it doesn't look nearly as nice so you could use a chisel to do this I've got one of these little corner chisel tools works pretty well it's got a plunge on it I'm sure a lot of you have seen these before you just kind of got to get it firmly positioned in place and it goes right into the corner and it'll Square things off pretty well so again just hold it firmly in place Square it up looks good so that removes almost all of the material as well very quick way to square off those Corners that's a general overview of this whole process to get to this point I've got nine pocket doors on this house so I've got a whole stack over here that I've got to do yet but we also need to show you how to do the latch plate once we get these mortise we'll go ahead and install these pocket doors and we'll need to mortise this latch plate into the jam on the door I'll show you that in just a second here for now I'm going to keep plugging away I've got this whole pile of doors yet to do a lot of sawdust yet to make so hopefully this is helping you guys out I'm going to keep plugging along all right guys so we just got done mortising all of our doors previously we're actually about a week into the future now so it's time to uh go ahead and put our lock plate or our strike plate into the jamb as you can see we've already already cased these openings I've got the pocket doors installed so this is the next step in the process you want to make sure on all of your privacy doors you install this plate our first step in this whole process of mortising the strike plate is going to be able to going to be to locate where the plate goes on the jamb now if you come around here I've got this plate here which goes on our larger mortise assembly on the door this strike plate needs to align so that whenever the lock comes out it goes perfectly into place with our strike plate these are very sensitive in terms of you do need to get them lined up properly and correctly now I have learned over the years that I've been installing these that you want to just go with the measurements that are on mtex drawing this comes with every lock set that you buy and it's a very simple easy to understand diagram as far as where put this so basically we've got this plate here our second plate according to the diagram just goes 1 8 of an inch lower than the top of this plate so all we've got to do is transfer the line from the top of this mortise over to the jamb and then we'll drop this one down an eighth of an inch and that'll be the height that this plate gets mortised in now to do this I very carefully want to take my square and my pencil and just transfer a line around the side of the door so that I can close it and Mark on the jamb so what I'll do now we'll just roll this closed and very simply I'm going to Mark the line for the top of my mortise right here now we do need to measure an eighth of an inch down for our height so I'm just going to put my tape up here very carefully mark across an eighth inch now the other thing that I like to do to Center the door I'll close it like this I'll push it against it so it's all the way on this side I'll mark down like so on this side now I'll go around to the other side and do the same process all right so I've got two lines here and to find the center of my strike plate all I do is I measure that and then Mark the center so I've got an inch and an eighth strong here so I'm going to go about 9 16 strong and that is the center of my strike plate we'll make a oopsie and we'll just go ahead and make a line straight up through the center of this next for our height we'll square off our lower line here which was an eighth of an inch lower so go ahead get my pencil lead lined up really nicely with that and now I'll go right here I'll put my plate up here and then I'm just going to Mark the bottom of it across here like so now this is the strike template that comes with the mtech pocket door template kit so you already watched me use the other part of this kit to do all of these mortises you also have this piece here which you can put in place nail it onto the jam and Route works really well I'd highly recommend again getting this template first step in doing this this is a two-piece template so I want to remove this white piece on here because we don't need that installed right now go ahead and pop that out use a screwdriver the Phillips bit now to position this in place I have already with this template I marked with my pencil the center on the bottom and on the top you can see here on the back side of the template so I can align these marks with the center line here and then I'm just going to use my eye to split the difference between my top and bottom line here keep in mind this template is designed to be used with a half inch mortising bit and a 5 8 guide bushing so this is going to be an eighth of an inch larger than your actual plate because it's designed to be used with that bushing but it's really easy just sight with your eye so you'll have a sixteenth above and below your lines get that centered and lined up take your hammer give it a little tap tap tappy and now we're ready to Route One thing I like to do before I start drilling holes and stuff take a strike plate stick it in there and I like to Mark where the actual screw holes go and the reason I'm doing that is because I don't want to accidentally remove too much material to where it goes where into where that screw hole area is I've done it too many times then I go to install the hardware on the final and I've actually hogged out too much material so that is why I'm doing that this point I'm also I'm going to take my white piece here I'm going to put it back in and I'm going to mark the bottom and the top here this is designed to mortise the larger deeper mortise not the larger mortise but the deeper mortise if you want to use a longer bit and hog that out you can do that I prefer to just use a half inch forstner bit and do it that way you will notice here so I marked the top and bottom of this larger mortise right here now the reason that I Mark the screw holes also you'll notice on the bottom here how close that is to the screw hole in the past I've gotten too close to that screw hole so I want to make sure I stay up far enough but there is plenty of space here I don't need to go all the way down into this area you'll notice that a couple things first off on my template here I've drawn an arrow pointing up that indicates to me that I always put this in the same direction pointed up you'll also see there's a arrow sticker on this piece that always needs to be oriented up this is not symmetrical you'll notice that the space here is actually lower our strike plate is symmetrical so why is that that this is off the reason is our locking mechanism as you can see it's going to go down whenever it latches and it's going to be much lower so we actually need to hog out more material on the lower side of the mortise so that this has somewhere to go so you'll see here the lower Port of the the lower portion of the locking mechanism is almost to the top of our screw hole here and that's why we want to be really precise whenever we do our deep mortise and not get into this area but we also have to make sure we come down low enough so I've learned I tried this back whenever I first bought this kit with a two routers and I had a larger router that would do this piece to go in deeper found I didn't really care for that what I like to do is use a half inch forstner bit so at this point right now I'll just take my forstner bit and I'll Center it in here on my pencil line and just drill this out foreign [Music] now you'll see we've obviously got a bunch of jagged holes here just take a sharp chisel and it's very easy just to flatten out that mortise I didn't quite do my holes perfectly ideally you like to have this connected but still will be pretty easy to get that all out of there so here we've we've accomplished the same thing that a large half inch spiral bit on the router would have done but it to me it's just a lot easier forstner bit and a chisel and it only takes a minute or so okay we're moving right along next part is going to be the mortise our actual depth for the strike plate here cordless router works great plunge base really makes it a lot easier to get your depth set exactly right unfortunately I forgot to bring my plunge base for this so we're going to do it the old-fashioned way with this router I've got my bit on here all I did was I took the uh the piece of Hardware here the strike plate I set it in place and then I just adjusted the router bit depth until it barely touched the wood on here so you will notice this bit this is the uh offset bit so I've got a half inch mortising bit here and a 5 8 inch bearing I mentioned this previously this is a fantastic combination for using with templates like this so now it's time to route we want to whenever using a template like this we want to make sure we're starting our bit in the template that way we don't accidentally damage our template foreign I did and I can already tell just by looking at this I don't think that I have my mortise deep enough so I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to set this a little bit deeper again having a plunge base makes it a lot easier to get your depth just perfect so I'm going to go a little deeper here okay that looks a little bit better okay we're routed so I'm gonna pop this off so now if we get in close here you'll see my pencil lines all around we got our height that looks really nice we're offset 1 8 of an inch down from the top of my other plate which is on the door and this all looks good so now I just need to square off these corners and we'll see how the fit is okay I've got my my Corners uh squared off you can use one of those Corner chisel punch tools also just a regular sharp chisel works well also you want to try and be as precise as possible with this so I've got the plate here you can see it doesn't quite want to go in a couple taps and that looks really good ideally you want to have it just sitting proud of the face I mean just a tiny tiny bit but that looks good we've got meat down here for this screw that's good so that's that's it that's all there is to it okay okay just to show you what the installation looks like on this again mtech Modern Hardware I realize a lot of you guys may be installing this and not actually have the hardware on site if that's the case you can use the instructions uh the diagram that comes with it I actually purchased this to have with my mortising kit that way I always have the exact thickness of the plates and stuff makes it a little bit easier to set the router and just confirm that my depth is correct to me it was worth making that investment and just having an extra set of hardware on hand so if we come in closer here you'll see as we turn the lock this pops down go and test our fit over here so everything locks really well lines up just exactly as it should so hope you guys have found this video helpful uh this kind of Hardware can be a little bit intimidating if you haven't done it before but hopefully this video helps you get through it and maybe learn it a little bit easier so hit that thumbs up we'll see you on the next video don't forget to subscribe and do all that stuff drop a comment for me helps out with the algorithm and we'll see you in the next video foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Insider Carpentry - Spencer Lewis

Views: 56,602

Keywords: insider carpentry, finish carpentry, emtek modern door hardware, emtek hardware installation, emtek modern pocket door hardware, pocket door installation, deep mortise pocket door, how to mortise for pocket door hardware, how to install pocket door hardware, how to install emtek hardware, porter cable 513 lock mortiser, templaco templates, templaco emtek templates

Id: BqeOv85CPvA

Length: 36min 13sec (2173 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023