Anyone make Exterior louvered shutters?

[Alex Horvath]

Hi,

I bought a pair a plastic exterior shutters just to see how they looked and my advice is to save your money.
I believe there is one manufacturer of the stock and various distributors assemble them for you.
The problem with these is the sizing - the rails and stiles are only about 3/4" thick and thus they have a very flat, insubstantial look.

The rotted shutters I took off my house have 1&1/2" thick rails and stiles and I think this is more common.
My shutters did not have real louvers but from what I can tell, fixed louvers are usually about 2” wide, ¼” thick and are set at 45 deg. Thus the louvers will occupy a vertical and horizontal space of 1” which allows the rail and stile to be up to 1/2” proud of the louvers which I think is a good look (rear of louvers could be flush with back of rails, stiles). I assume no vertical overlap on the louvers.

The trick is how to make the recess for the louvers. Rockler has a jig but it's for 1&1/4" louvers and it has mixed reviews.
Ii would be fairly easy to make a router jig to cut a single recess but I'm concerned about accurately positioning the jig to maintain louver spacing.


I suppose I could add a short section of louver to the jig which would fit in the first/adjacent recess thus setting the spacing?

Thanks for any tips

[Mel Fulks]

The better type of old shutter slats had beveled edges flush with both sides of the frame. If you have a radial arm saw and a set of dados you can make a wooden ratchet and pawl to space the cuts in the stiles. Many of the old ones had the slats at an angle steeper than 45 degrees,it's a nice look.

[Darcy Warner]

A louver groover.

[Jamie Buxton]

Do you have a mortiser, or a mortising head to fit your drill press? Y'know, a machine that drills square holes?

If you do, there's a neat method for making fixed-louvered doors or shutters. Machine each louver with a square-cross-section tenon on each end. That's a simple tablesaw operation, and you can make a million quickly. Use the mortiser to mill matching mortises in the stiles. To set up the mortiser, you set the angle of the mortise at the angle you want the louver to sit. That's different from the usual setup, where the mortising chisel is parallel to the sides of the workpiece. Just use pencil to lay out all your mortise positions on the stiles. This gets you around the big issue with step-and-repeat jigs: repeat far enough, and the mortises can slowly drift away from where they should be.

[Mel Fulks]

With the ratchet and pawl there is little if any error ,as the ratchet stick is laid out with dividers. And shop made ratchet sticks are often made for the old machines that cut the round ends on the common type of shutters, in order to match old work. For use on the self feeding machines the ratchet bars have to be metal .

[lowell holmes]

Google "Exterior Wood Shutters"

You will find them.

Lowes and Home Depot sell them.

[Tom Welch]

If you don't mind spending a little money on a template for your router, you can buy jigs from Puritan CNC (puritancnc.com) to cut all your groves in your stiles. I got the jig for the Bahamas shutter and it is a first rate jig. Shipping was fast, I ordered it on a Thursday and had it on Wed. I bought 2 jigs that mate together for the long stiles I need for the Bahamas shutters. I have no affiliation with them, except a happy customer. They have several jigs to choose from depending on what kind of shutter you want to build.

[lowell holmes]

You can rip and also groove 3/4" thick on a table saw in a heart beat. You need rip guides to hold the stock against the fence.
You can make them out of 1X4. I make mine with 3/8" thick fingers. You cut the fingered end of the guide at a slight angle.

[Frank Drew]

I fabbed up a tilting table on my slot mortiser for angled but fixed blade shutters. It's easy to round over the blade edges to match precisely the stopped slots in the stiles. The blades were about 1/4" shy of the outside faces of the stiles. Assembly was a bit fussy due to all those small-ish parts going into their mortises but the only glue I needed was for the frame rails and stiles.

[Ron Kurzius]

I made 50 of them, half of them over 5' tall. I made a left and right jig for my plunge router. For layout you just want to have a slight overlap on the slats. I figured the lay out for the three different sizes and then transferred that to all the rails.

These were made out of VGF with 1" 1/2 X 1" 1/4 rails. The wider being the face. The slats are 1" 3/4 by 5/16 rounded over to match the mortise made by the router.

Looks like you have it all figured out, pm me with an email address and I can take pictures of the jigs for you.

[Mel Fulks]

Have to comment here on the power of convention. The methods in this thread are ,no doubt, working well but certainly a lot of work. The old bevel slat type shutters are and have always been more expensive than the currant type. Much more expensive and almost always hinged,even if seldom closed. Without an old time machine to make the cuts for modern slats the modern type are now MORE work than the old ones cut with radial arm saw. I think the new aluminum and plastic shutters have given the rounded slat real wood type a new popularity. I will get used to it.

[Mark Bolton]

Be smart. You cant beat someone at what they do every day. https://www.subercustomshutters.com/

[lowell holmes]

Be smart. You cant beat someone at what they do every day. https://www.subercustomshutters.com/

We have a winner! I agree. . . .

[Jon McElwain]

I seem to remember someone making the slots with a Festool Domino. Unless you've got the big daddy domino, you would be limited to slats being about an inch wide thought.

[Darcy Warner]

I seem to remember someone making the slots with a Festool Domino. Unless you've got the big daddy domino, you would be limited to slats being about an inch wide thought.

They got the idea of the domino from their original louver groovers they made in the 50's.