swschrad's Journal: double-dooring the joint

actually, 38-dooring the joint. only three cabinet doors left to glue up tonight, and that includes the 6 that had, uhhh, various defects and had to have some components remade.

got the ceilings repainted in the main bedroom and hallway, new lights in the hallway and front entry, and the entire main bedroom is faux finished. we're going to put off the (hellish) second bedroom... the wife's sewing stuff is as nasty to disassemble and stash someplace as is my computer desk and cable menagerie. so we're only going to do that room once. carpet goes in weekend after Easter, so sometime in a week or so, we're going to gut that room, pull the moldings, rip the carpet and tack strip, patch and repaint... and leave it for the carpetlayers.

got to play tonight with several alternatives in planing the surface of the 38 doors. I have a little power planer, an old but trusty 16-inch block plane in maple, sanders galore, and a rotten old piece of tempered steel someplace that would make a great scraping knife. somewhere in there, using some wood scraps glued up to mimic a door edge, I hope to find a process to clean up some 10 doors with high rails (or high stiles if you flip the door over) made of hard red oak.

this sort of stuff occurs when you mill a pickup load of oak boards with a roman ogee rail and stile bit set... everything looks good in the model making stage... and then Son #2 comes over, gets the bug, and routes all the wood with the stile bit in one long afternoon without using the micrometer to make sure all the wood is milling the same.

I knew I was in for it when I changed bits to cut the rail coves, and noticed the top cutter in the stile bit had rotated 90 degrees, chewing up the copper spacer disk. didn't know how bad the damage was. fortunately for the forests of north america, I had enough wood butchered so I didn't have to mill a bunch other stuff. and I can cut that stile milling off flush in the table saw, and make the doors in the bathroom and laundry room cabinets at a more normal width of 2-1/8 actual.

but in the meantime, not knowing anybody with an open-side planer (fussy big cast iron bastards that take half a day to set up if they are moved,) I have to clean up 10 or 12 of my 38 doors to the tune of between 1/32 and 1/16 inch (in a couple cases.)

this is why replacement doors for refacing cost $100-250, I guess.