The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book on Custom Door Production. Brevity is not my strong suit.....
Part One - Planning
The job was pair of 36” x 108” tall one 'panel' Honduras Mahogany doors with a “woven look” to the panels. I think I may have seen this woven look once before, perhaps in an Indonesian gate. I think that gate was actually woven, using green wood. The request came from an interior designer that knew the shop and would let me fill in the details, as long as she was kept in the loop. The only other particulars were size. They were to be the main entry for a new upscale restaurant.
The problem solving - one of our favorite things - started right away. I found myself sketching at the dinner table, at the taphouse, at my bench, while I should be doing something else. The complex projects get into my head and take over. Not at all unpleasant, but hard to avoid. First up was some sketching, and I spent quite some time trying to draw the look, and to visualize what we were to make. I had to close my eyes and rotate the parts in my head, and hold them there, like a meditative focus. Then I'd get distracted, and have to bring up the images again, and hold.
Eventually I knew enough to draw again. The drawings were nice, but only captured two dimensions - they lacked that pesky third dimension, critical to a woven look. So, I move onto wood, settling on 6” squares of 8/4 Poplar and Maple to shape and play with, as well as some MDF squares for the two dimensional effect. I then started thinking in terms of tiles - a major step towards a solution. Prior to that, I felt the parts were to be one sided and reversible. One part would be an 'out' part, and the neighboring part would be an 'in' part. Turn them over, and the 'ins' become the 'outs' and the “outs' turn into 'ins”. That presents some interesting characteristics and may be worth pursuing one day. But not this job, not this time.
Now the next step was Justin’s realization that squares were not the best way there, so we changed it to where the tiles were 3/4” longer than wide, or 3/4” wider than long. First with some MDF mock-ups, then once we saw how that helped things, we moved on to some 8/4 Poplar tiles. The tiles would all have grain running vertically in the door, although this is not the only way to go. We did it so we could treat the panel as a solid wood panel, with four tiles wide and 12 tiles tall, all grain running vertically.
I also made the width 3/4” narrower than the length. This made for a small 3/4” opening as the parts - now tiles – were arranged. We had a fractional bit of latitude in panel width, but had to make the parts come out even as they ran from stile to stile. We had more latitude with the height by varying the bottom rail width. We could settle on a master part size fairly easily and early in the build.
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I quickly sized about 6-8 parts to the needed sizes and began to manipulate them around to see how the might work. I added a 45 degree bevel to the four long edges to give the illusion of a taper as the parts weave into and out of each other. The bevel could be modified should it need it.
I thought I was making great headway, but the limitations – 2 dimensions, with only a hint of the third - presented results that did not look like a woven panel. The sides were to have plows and two would have tongues. As I started roughing that in, I realized something critical: These were more and more looking like tiles. Specifically, I found myself thinking of the old 1/2” thick ubiquitous 'parquet' flooring that was made of parts of smaller wood, but they all had two tongue sides and two groove sides, adjacent, so they could be pivoted around just like tiles. That seemed to work. Work so well in fact, that I was sure I was going to have to discard it since the woven part would probably preclude the tile solution. The third dimension.
In our normal design work, we have only two dimensions. The third dimension is implied and fixed ion the door thickness. It is almost never a variable in a design sense. So we have these nice 2-1/4” thick door frames, and in order to enhance the depth, I planned on using 10/4 Mahogany for the basket weave. I was forcing myself to work with the scrap tiles since the Honduras was a bit expensive to play around with.
As I was visualizing one side bowed, I sawed a curve on one face. Then on the other side. Then the same on a second tile. Serendipity arrived, with a quick, overwhelming and warming realization that I had it – no need for a concave side for every convex side. They can all be convex on both sides of the part! I did not need a bowed side and a hollow side, only bowed. The concave is implied, but never visible. Never made.
That rush of awareness, that stimulation of the heart and brain is at the heart of why I work wood. It does not happen every day, and is in fact, pretty damn rare. But the several times a year that I get such a feeling are wonderful and keep me coming back.
Now the next step was Justin’s realization that squares were not the best way there, so we changed it to where the tiles were 3/4” longer than wide, or 3/4” wider than long. First with some MDF mock-ups, then once we saw how that helped things, we moved on to some 8/4 Poplar tiles. The tiles would all have grain running vertically in the door, although this is not the only way to go. We did it so we could treat the panel as a solid wood panel, with four tiles wide and 12 tiles tall, all grain running vertically.
I think if we are to do it again, we might alternate the grain for an even more accurate woven look and feel.
We beveled the edges on the Poplar, giving a dimension to the ‘sides’ of the weaving strips. This eliminated the integral tongues, a step I was reluctant to give up since I appreciated its elegance and the need to make bunches of loose splines. The faces of the tiles were curved to a 10” radius segment. This gave us an apparent change in thickness of 3/4” per side. How to make the curves? This had been discussed quite a bit during breaks and general conversation.
Justin began to build a 20” circular jig that would hold four of the tiles at a time and rotate against a fixed bearing under some 6” straight knives in the shaper. The 20” diameter of the jig coincided with the 10” radius that gave us a radius of for the face of each part, or tile. A full plywood top for the jig further helped hold the tiles in place while the power feeder fed them in a slow, accurate circle. The tiles were held in place on all four edges.
The cut was not huge, but soon proved too much. The “Jig of Complete Happiness” was immediately a problem.
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