Thread: WIP Diminished stile French Doors

Slash Pine is my new favourite soft wood. I cut the glazing bars with very little effort and they came from the plane fairly smoothly. As a precaution I made more bars than I need and tried to use a piece of old hoop pine for one. That was an education after the slash, the hoop was just all tearout, breakout and chips. Ptooie!

Can you get slash pine in board sizes for furniture?

I then farted around with joint layouts. The way I went about gluing up the stiles left me with a bit of cleanup required to get them squared, but I got there in the end (I think). The bottom and mid rails look like they should be twin tenoned so I wasted some time trying to work out tenon sizes, unfortunately Walton, my go to bible on joints, fails to cover twin tenons. Then came the problem of trying to work out setbacks for the mould and rebates. I measured off my glazing bars but they all vary a bit as I obviously did not hold the moulding plane at a consistent angle all the time I was striking them.

Both sets of stiles are now marked out, I still have to layout the rails. One thing I did realize while doing the joint layouts is that my plan for mounting these as a bifold arrangement has one major oversight. I forgot to consider an allowance for a door handle and how that affects the fold back. I'm still considering options.

layout1.jpg

Originally Posted by Fuzzie

Slash Pine is my new favourite soft wood.

Can you get slash pine in board sizes for furniture?

Franklin,
I'd never heard of it until your thread and so have also never heard of it at any timber yard down here .
I did just google it though .
How do you know its Slash pine ? Pinus elliottii, as Wikipedia told me .
So many pines are impossible to tell apart .

Nice looking project, Id like to be able to sit back and look at some doors like that . Biggest Ive done for home were paneled pantry doors. I may get a chance for a front door where I am now. The one that's there is falling apart.

Rob

Originally Posted by auscab

How do you know its Slash pine ?

Hi Rob,

Umm, the bloke in the wreckers yard told me.

The studs had grading stamps, I tried to crop a pic from one of my early photos but they are a bit fuzzy, not sure if that also contains a species id. The timber is fine grained for the usual sort of pine I see and clearly not Radiata or Hoop. My google search lists Slash pine as a plantation species grown in SE Queensland, so the locals probably know it.

Being construction grade this door is going to have faults because of quite a few small knots. Most of the studs looked pretty much quarter swan, but a couple were flat sawn. Flat sawn sections are starting to 'flake' a bit along the rings or at least show big differences between the early/late wood.

Another 'rustic' project from me.

slashPineStamp.jpg

It grows up there ,and the wrecker told you, and its not like the pines you know sounds pretty good
Its a nice looking pine .
The good thing about making doors is they use up narrow wood .

Edit. looks like you could use a sticking board as well . They make moulding with a plane a bit easier.

Rob

I had to look up sticking board but I don't think I'll ever be running enough mouldings of the same size to warrant making one. The blank held well enough between the bench dogs, although I took a bit of skin off my pinkie with my hand skimming along the benchtop.

I had heard slash pine mentioned before, but not knowing what it was, I think I assumed it was downgrade stuff slashed back when thinning out Radiate Pine plantations.

Just a flat board , a stick glued to it and a stop at one end , I like to glue a slit block in for the stop , not screws . And a way of clamping to your bench . Just make it to long and use clamps.

My first one was a 10 minute slap together and I ended up using it the next 15 years , it evolved into having a stop both sides of the stick for when I wanted to come back the other way on the other side.

Then I did a more complex one later with a V on an edge for laying mouldings in with the shaped side pointing to the roof which clamped using my bench dogs or vice. Great for shaping 3 inch long corner blocks for gluing in around bracket feet. Not the gluing surfaces, the heavily planed bit you see when you turn an 18th C chest upside down

If you do it I think you will discover just how good they are . A board with the rebate formed from the stick and a strip glued on to support the moulded side of your moulding already done will be even better . 10 minutes and you'll never look back. then one formed for planing the rebates on the back should follow.

Unless you do your mouldings on the edge of a board that is wide and cut them off this is the way to go. Sales pitch over

edit . This looks nice , Id still do wood stops though not screws.

Sash - Wooden Screws - Progressive Gardening


Rob

Off mouldings for the minute, time for some serious mortising! This is a time I wish I had a chisel mortiser; but a chisel, mallet and a hand drill will have to do. The widest section of the meeting stiles is 135mm. Slow going....
mortise1.jpg

After laying out the lines for the sloping shoulder and allowing for a mould to be struck on all edges seems to mean the shoulder will have to be pared to the line by hand, I can't see a way to fit a saw to the line (hand, or machine)
shoulder1.jpg

I'll probably use a jigsaw to get close to the first (heavy) line and then pare to the final line (light) after the mould is cut on the diminished edge.

The accompaniment to large mortises is large tenons. My back saws aren't big enough for the job so I had to resort to using a small Disston cross cut saw. Works ok, but the cuts did tend to skew out a bit and there will be a bit of cleanup required once the cheeks come off. I'm hoping the joints don't come out too loose, if so I guess I could pin them as well as using a good glue.
tenon1.jpg

When that was finished I ran the grooves for the lower panels and then set about starting the moulds. Unfortunately I think I've made the panel grooves too large for use with the current moulding plane (1/4"x1/2"). My doors are basically 1 1/2" thick with a 1/2" groove. Cutting with the current plane the 1/2" depth of mould would run into the groove. I'm considering options. The panel area of the Victorian doors have square shoulders and applied mouldings, but I'm trying to match the modern doors with the struck moulding matching top and bottom, no doubt made with a door set router bit.

I think I'll need to somehow make a 1/4" x 1/4" mould below.

Not having any suitable hand tool to cut the moulds around the panel grooves, I resorted to some mechanical aid. To make the 1/4" mould I used a larger roundover bit with a bearing in the router. I set it to just nibble a curve and shoulder the right depth and then did two runs cutting from both the face and edge. This gave me a start for a 1/4" x 1/4" mould that I finished off with a scratch stock.
mould2.jpg

I then moved on to cutting the mould and rebates on the glazed section of the stiles. This proved less satisfactory. It was harder to maintain the moulding plane angle on the longer runs and starting or finishing the mould into the shoulders was difficult. There is a good 300mm that is not well cut, diminishing to no cut at all. On the rebate side, it was easy enough to chop out the remaining stopped end with a chisel and plane, but the mould side is more difficult. The scratch stock is not working so well here and the small knots are just scraping purgatory. I kept at it a while but my hands and fingers had had enough after a couple of hours so this is going to take a couple of sessions to finish off.
mould1.jpg

Time to attack the shoulders. First step is to reconfirm the layout lines. I tried to knife them in but it was difficult to hold a rule to the line and the knife blade also insisted on following the grain. I subsequently found a good use for my Masters clearance 50mm chisel. Although I hadn't got around to sharpening it yet, it was quite sharp enough to cut in the line with just a couple of strikes!

IMG_1806.jpg

Next step was cutting the waste off near to the line with the jigsaw. I never trust a jigsaw so I stayed well away to ensure the blade wasn't wandering into the line on the unseen side.
IMG_1808.jpg
To square the shoulder to the line I started making chisel cuts crossways and pared back roughly freehand. At this point I decided I needed to finish the mould, which I did by chiseling a couple of narrow rebates to remove most of the waste and finished off with the scratch stock.
IMG_1809.jpg IMG_1815.jpg IMG_1817.jpg
I still needed to cleanup the cut to the shoulder line and tried unsuccessfully first with a wide chisel, then with a block plane. I finally hit on the idea of clamping a block to the face and easily finessed to the line.
IMG_1820.jpg
It will be interesting to see if this all comes together reasonably.

Nice job there, looks like they will turn out well.

With regard to the pine. It looks nothing like the many thousands of cube of Slash Pine i sold over the years from the Caboolture mill. I'd say at the least you have some nice clear Radiata there.

DD thanks for the insight, looks like I'm back to mystery pine. It sure doesn't work like any Radiata I've come across before, it is more like some heat treated North American pallet wood I used last year which was similarly light, tight grained and very dry.

Mainly due to the sloppy sawing of the tenons, fitting the joints is turning into a bit of a tedious exercise. However I do believe I've reached the point where I think this might all actually work out. I really could use more space and an assembly table to work on.
door3.jpg

A bit more fitting, the mortises cut for haunching and mitres on the mould corners, all required before I could actually have a real clamp up to see how truly things align. I was thinking of scribing the mould corners, but I don't have any suitable and sharp gouges that could be put to work, so they just got simple mitres.

Unfortunately the shoulders on the mid rail didn't work out precisely the same as the shoulders on the stiles, so I'll have to see if there is any adjustments I can make there to close up the joints. It's only a matter of a mm or so, but it is quite obvious over the length of the join.

doors4.jpg