We've been without a door for our first floor guest bathroom for...oh let's see here...almost 4 years. Since gutting and remodeling our Craftsman Bungalow back in 2003, I promised my wife I would make all of the doors that I threw out (they were in really, really bad shape). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get to this "honey do" item until this week.
To match all of our hardwood floors, I went with Birch for the doors. It's a very hard, dense wood and not as expensive as Maple. It has a lot of unique figuring and color variation which I find appealing. The bad thing about it is it likes to move a lot, so measures must be taken to prevent this.
To keep a Birch door stable without using a veneered stave-core construction method, I picked up this face-to-face lamination technique that actually works quite well. I've made 3 entry doors using this method and they've stayed straight and true throughout the seasons.
The stiles and rails are comprised of 2 layers of wood, glued face-to-face with their growth rings opposed. The idea here is that the one layer keeps the other from cupping or twisting, and vice-versa. For an 1-3/8" interior door, I start with 4/4's Birch and plane it down to just under 3/4" of an inch. I keep the boards thicker, wider and longer than what I need at this point. The boards get their inside face slathered in Type II wood glue, and then sandwiched between 2 very straight 2x6 cauls (wrapped in celaphane tape so the glue won't adhere), then clamped every 4-6 inches. I leave them clamped for 24 hours, then move on to the next set of boards. Repeat until all of the door parts are made and you're left with a bunch of ugly wood and glue sandwiches.
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The next step is to mill the composite boards to their thickness, rip them to width and cut them to length, except the 2 outside stiles...I leave them long until the door is glued up. This makes it easier to disassemble to door when doing a dry run assembly. I also keep a few small cut-offs handy (exact thickness and width) for setting up the tenon jig and dado blade.
Next, I use one of the cutoffs to set up the tenon jig, then cut the tongues of the tenon. To cut cheeks, I use my JessEm Miter Excel on the table saw which produces very accurate crosscuts. Once all of the tenons are cut, I move on to the dadoes which will receive the panels. In this case, I'm using 1/2" panels, so I dial in my dado blade to exactly that width. The boards are run through the table saw on edge and I use a featherboard to keep them flat up against the fence. Again, I use one of my cut-off scraps to set the fence and the depth.
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The next step was for me to layout the stiles and rails to the door's final dimension so I could mark the mortise locations. The top and bottom rails are haunched tenons, so I marked those as well. To haunch the tenons, I just used my bandsaw.
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cont'd...