How to build a new cabin door?

[Mark Turner]

I have to build a new cabin door for the side entrance into the Galley. It's an approximately 4 x 2 ft door with a window panel in the top half of the door. I'm planning to build a stile and panel door, with approximately 3/4 x 1-1/2 stiles. I'm also planning to use dowels or biscuits for the stiles jointery. I will probably paint both the inside and outside of the door. I'm concerned about warping because, as a side door, it will be exposed to the elements. Is there a preference for what type of wood should I use to avoid warping? I have a salvaged mahogony cabinet that I could use as the bottom panel. Any other recommendations / warnings? Thanks for your help.

Mark

[Bob Smalser]

Stiles especially require quarter or riftsawn stock, but rails also benefit. It's the expansion of those stiles that make doors stick. The panels should be made to float with enough clearance not to bind in their grooves during the wet, so it's those dead-straight, stable q-sawn stiles and top/bottom rails set in perfectly-square joints that keep the door flat.

3/4 stiles an inch and a half wide aren't near strong enough for even a 24X48 door. I'd look to make them 1 to 1 1/4" thick and 3" or so wide with a 5-6" bottom rail and a 4-5" center and top rails.

I'd also forget about biscuits, as they aren't strong enuf for the application, either, although dowel joinery would work for perhaps a decade before it falls apart. Remember that endgrain in the rails is not a gluing surface...there needs to be a joint there so some facegrain of the rails gets glued.

All...every single one of them...round tenon and dowel joints eventually break their glue bond because of the way round stock shrinks and swells. Might take a while using epoxy, but it's still just a matter of time.

The typical joint for your application is the haunched mortise and tenon, often a through tenon with two "fox" wedges driven in from the outside stile edge. Such a joint can be dismantled and repaired some day when it needs it.

A weaker alternative, but marginally adequate for your small door is to mill deep panel slots the length of your stiles and rails, and mill short tongue tenons in your rails to fit. That'll provide some gluing surface but inadequate strength....to add strength, install two long dowels through the outside edges of the stiles into the rails after you have glued the frame up square and the glue has cured. Use 3/4" dowels...birch are fine of you cover them with rot-resistant bungs and keep the door painted.

For woods in your area, in a brightwork application I'd want H. Mahog. In a painted application you can use tight Doug Fir if you can find some really good stock. Alaska Yellow or Port Orford Cedar would also work, as they are about as hard as Doug Fir but plane and sand more crisply and take paint better. Otherwise you want a wood that's at least moderately durable, doesn't mold and takes glue and paint well.

One feature of panels often done in marine work you don't generally see in uptown cabinetmaking is the center-pinned panel:

http://www.woodbin.com/calcs/shrinkulator.htm

Look at the stock you are laying up for your vertical panels and determine whether flat or quarter sawn or approximately what percentage in between.

Then compute how much that panel is gonna move seasonally with a moisture swing based on local conditions. Don't know about Sacramento...but if it is as wet as San Francisco in winter and dry as Yakima in summer, then you may have seasonal swings as broad as 7-13% as opposed to the 9-13% that's more common.

Make sure your stile grooves are deep enuf to accommodate that movement (rail groove depths should be a loose fit but otherwise unimportant), and if there is any possibility at all of a gap opening up at the edge during the dry, then pin the center of that panel to the top and bottom rails with a small dollop of glue or a small brass box nail.

[ 10-30-2004, 08:11 AM: Message edited by: Bob Smalser ]

[Mark Turner]

Thank you for the advise Bob. I'll employ all of it. Being a novice, I was trying to use methods that I'd be less likely to muff up (ie biscuits and dowels). Based on what you've told me though, it looks like I should spend the time to learn how to do proper jointery work. Do you have any recommendations on a good "how to" reference (Are there good on-line woodworking tutorials?) Again, thanks.

mark

[paladin]

You might get Binghams book on yacht joinery from our sponsers...

[Jack Heinlen]

Bob has several tutorials here on cutting proper mortises.

I read through his stuff here, and have nothing much to add, except that a cabinet shop set up with a mortiser could cut the mortises in twenty minutes. They don't have to be through. The tenons can be done on a table saw, or a radial arm saw, or with a back saw.

Oh, and when gluing the frame around the panel make sure the glue in the mortises doesn't bleed over and capture the corners of the panel. That panel gotta move, understand!

If you go to a decent library they'll have a book that will reveal the secrets in a few hours(Look for the Fine Woodworking Series. Differnt glues, but all else applies). Getting it done is a different matter. Before you go cutting up your finish stock, mahogany, whatever, take time to practice a bit.

Best of luck.

[ 11-02-2004, 06:00 PM: Message edited by: Jack Heinlen ]

[Mark Turner]

Bob, et. al.

I've had trouble locating q-sawn doug fir or cedar of adequate thickness (1" - 1 1/2") here in Sacramento. I did find some white oak at a pretty good price and wanted your opinion regarding its use for the rails and stiles. (I did the searchy thing and couldn't find any discussion on using white oak for such an application.) I want a painted door and understand that white oak isn't the best wood to paint and/or sand. Is white oak an acceptable alternative and if so, how would you recommend it be prepared for painting? Thank you

Cheers,

Mark

[John Blazy]

Bob is right on for very correct joinery, but I think I can add a little help. First off, Western cedar can be found in most home centers at 7/8" thickness, rough on one side (very common exterior trim wood, good exterior weatherability). If you pilfer through the stock, you can find close to quarter sawn material and straight. Assuming you have a table saw, you can rip the material to the width's Bob mentioned, then re-saw the rough faces down, or simply handplane (better) and sand the rough surface and still get over 13/16".

Great counsel on the pitfalls of dowels (I never use them) and biscuits would likely work (double "20's" per joint, set in epoxy), but I personnally would use the T-saw to cut "open" mortice and tenon joints, then epoxy. Been doing it for years, and it will never need re-doing, as long as you "pre-wet" with epoxy, to keep the joint from being starved. Much easier, faster, and glue-surface-friendly than chopping them by hand or with a hollow chisel morticer, or cutting the tenons with a backsaw. LOTS of glue surface area there. Once you dry clamp the whole assembly, you can mill the groove with a router and a 1/4" wing cutter.

Good points on "pinning" the panel into the center, for equal movement. Since you are painting the door, you might want to run a thin bead of elastic polyurethane sealant on the bottom groove where the panel meets the groove. It'll keep water from getting into the groove, and should stretch with expansion/contraction.
- JB

[Bob Smalser]

I just bought Bingham's book used on Amazon, and it offers nothing to speak of on doors. In fact, he came upon joinery later in life and the book isn't the life-long interior joiner's treatise I expected. It's OK, but pretty general stuff.

White oak is heavy, but might be OK if kept painted and doesn't weather check. But my preference remains H. Mahogany, it simply has no competitor for your application.

WRC is a bit soft for a door subject to slamming, but it's a small door and I'm certain you have cedar vendors supplying the fence trade. Picking through and "highgrading" the stock as John suggests will be much less expensive for your first door. Up here I've found whiter, harder, noticably-heavier mislabeled Port Orford Cedar mixed in with the Western Red at fence suppliers, so you might just get lucky if you look around.

But treated with epoxy and polyurethane, even soft WRC can make a lovely, if not dent-free door. Needs a lexan window instead of glass, tho....and the rails/stiles need to be thicker than you'd do in mahogany.

Before highgrading reject planking stock:

http://pic3.picturetrail.com/VOL12/1104763/4664832/55976522.jpg

After highgrading:

http://pic3.picturetrail.com/VOL12/1104763/4664832/55976553.jpg

That 3-board drop door is pretty now, but in five years it'll be a dinged-up, splintered antique in need of some rehab.

[ 11-12-2004, 10:17 PM: Message edited by: Bob Smalser ]

[John Blazy]

Ya know, Bob, I've run across harder planks of cedar in the cedar section at Lowes, and maybe they were the Port Orford mixed in with the WRC?

[Bob Smalser]

Originally posted by John Blazy:
Ya know, Bob, I've run across harder planks of cedar in the cedar section at Lowes, and maybe they were the Port Orford mixed in with the WRC?Obviously I can't tell from here, but WRC is pretty uniform stock....major variations in color and weight among individual boards could just be wetter, undesirable sapwood, but also could be another species of cedar.

[Bob Smalser]

Forgot to mention lock sets.

Don't begin your door until you have all the hardware on hand...you always want to choose your own challenges.

Lock sets just don't go anywhere...they go in at the center rail, and you don't want to either drill through or screw into the center rail tenon. That means you use a double tenon there with the lock set placed in between.

By far the best book on doors and other general joinery I know of remains George Ellis' British book, "Modern Practical Joinery" from 1908 available as a reprint from Amazon or mjdtools.com. Not a how-to, but the 480 pages of incredible detail provides excellent joint layout, design and proportion to copy.

Also decent is Audel's Carpenter's and Builder's Guide from 1923, Volume II with better detail than Ellis on installing doors, although on a marine door you'll have cabin side below the bottom rail sufficiently high to protect from green water, instead of the threshold.

[ 11-15-2004, 02:13 AM: Message edited by: Bob Smalser ]

[Mark Turner]

Thanks again for the great advice. I'm still looking for the right stock to build the door with. In the meantime, I've picked up some cheap stock to build a mock-up of the door. I also found a 1 day hands-on joinery course in the first week of December. Along with reading Bob's tutorials on the forum and perhaps one of the books suggested here, hopefully I'll build a nice door. I figure I can't let you guys down after you've spent the time to help me out. I plan to post photos of the door when I'm done. By the way, John, I've had your glass website bookmarked for a while now. Very beautiful stuff.

[ 11-15-2004, 04:05 PM: Message edited by: Mark Turner ]

[John Blazy]

Thanks, Mark. I updated it recently with new projects and the "About Us" page has recent shots of my boat on the turquiose waters of Torch Lake.

[Stargazer14]

There is a mahogany door out of a Trojan about that same size on Ebay right now, i will try to find the link.
Less work and all the character for only a few dollars...

Of course, making your own is more rewarding.