Help with racked doors

[Matthew Dworman]

Well, one of the problems with taking your sweet a$! time to complete a project is that wood moves.
I have been working on this for some time now, and am ready to yank out my remaining hair in frustration. My shop stays a relatively constant 55* Fahrenheit year round, but it is quite moist in the summer an now quite dry in the winter .
I have fitted the inset doors with perfection - even reveal and hung on knife hinges, but now they are racked and are only flush at the top or the bottom, but not both... How do I fix this???

Overall:

Just the right doors:


Looking down the stiles on the right doors


BTW this is primarily a neander project...
The wood is air dried cherry - all from the same log. The stiles and top rail are all quartersawn/riftsawn and the bottom rails are flatsawn. I think that the movement is originating in the bottom rails with twisting either pushing out or pulling in on a corner...

[Sean Hughto]

Doors like this require careful stock selection and then a lot of care in the making and luck in the result. I go with quartersawn all around. That's not to say I don't still get some racking from time to time for various reasons. If this were mine, I'd plane or sand the protruding parts of the door. The gradual thickness difference will not be noticable unless one is looking for it. Hassling with hinges is another approach, but my expereince is that it easy to make things worse when you start down this path, and extremely figidity, especially with knife hinges. Good luck!

[Brian Vaughn]

I think the first thing I'd do is take it into an environment similar to its new home (Indoors, moderate to low humidity) and let it acclimate there before I did anything. I've done adjustments to make something work in the shop, only to have the problem reemerge when I got it in the house. Once it's stabilized, then you can start looking at adjusting the doors, if you decide its necessary.

[Rick Erickson]

I've had moderate success with this approach. http://charlesneilwoodworking.com/ca...=doortwist.flv