Making interior French doors

[Alex Horvath]

Hi,

Been thinking about this one for a while now. I'm an intermediate woodworker and I have "Make your own Handcrafted Doors and Windows" by John Birchard (not terribly well written IMO).

The book is somewhat dated and he uses shapers but MLCS has a 1&3/8" and 1&3/4" rail and stile door set. Freud just announced a French door set $300+ which presumably handles the muntins better but I don't like the way they put the sets together (set has bits most people will already have) and their aren't any specs available yet..

Anyhow, before I jump in I thought I'd ask a few questions on things I'm not sure on -

Material - I'd like to use Mohagany. As the book says, doors are especially sensitive to warping, and it's more obvious with double French doors. He suggests using quarter sawn or rift sawn lumber. Of course you see a lot of quarter sawn oak but is quarter or rift sawn Mohagany available? It's not essential on an interior door but if I can get it...

Muntins - This is the part that was most confusing to me but the book provides lots of advice in this area. The only caveat with a router is that on one side of the muntin, the profile will have to be removed so the glass can be inserted (I'm assuming no router bit specifically for 1&3/4" muntins is available). The MLCS literature suggests to do this hand held with a rabbet bit after door assembly but this would have me chewing my nails to say the least.

In the book, the author describes a stock holding jig with the cope profile to cut the stick on the router/shaper and I'm sure something similar could be done to remove the profile on one side of the muntins using a router table with a rabbit bit. Then the matching glass stop can be cut from stock suitably prepared with the stick profile.

The author shows various other tricks for cutting accurate muntins such as cutting the cope on the ends of wide stock first and then ripping the stock appropriately.

My above ramblings are to convince myself that I can make the muntins with the descibed router bit set and if you agree/disagree please let me know.

Mortise and Tenon - A true mortise and tenon for the door frame can be done on a shaper when the top cutter can be removed (and I think some router bits allow this also) but I don't see a spline tenon as a problem. At first I was surprised that the author did not use mortise and tenon joints on the muntins but in retrospect I don't think muntins add much strength to doors anyhow.


Anyhow, I'll keep an eye out for the specs on the Freud bits. Don't you just love it that freudtools.com often has no specs on their bits. www.freud-tools.com (http://www.freud-tools.com) does but they don't even list that bit set yet.

FYI, I need 2 8' French doors and custom sidelight. The doors alone run about $1000 ea.

Thanks for any comments,

Alex

http://www.mlcswoodworking.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/smarthtml/pages/katana_bits1.htm

http://www.freudtools.com/p-418-french-door-bit-set.aspx

[Neal Clayton]

freud-tools is not freud, it's an internet dealer that is using a variation of their name. i'm surprised they haven't sued that guy yet to get that domain from him, since he's obviously representing himself as freud.

the freud bits let you make an integrated tenon as well, just use the fence as a stop and make multiple passes.

there's no reason you can't leave a tenon on the muntins as well. in fact using a loose tenon would be adding an extra step that's really unnecessary, since the cope cutter will cut the tenon for you.

quarter sawn boards tend to stay straight. this is an issue on doors since the longer stiles can warp, that's why quarter sawn boards are recommended for doors.

the way that that set of bits you linked works is those slot cutters cut the rabbet for you as you cut the stick profile. so there's no need to cut them after. then you cut the opposing stick profile with the smaller bit and nail those in place.

only other suggestion: make the pair a hair wide and long, i make doors 1/8 large all the way around. it's not very difficult to trim a door to fit after the fact, just a length of angle iron as a guide and a skilsaw. but, of course, it's quite difficult to add more if they come out short to start with ;).

the design of these bits is kinda the "easy" way. optimally, you oversize one side of your muntins, cut the smaller stick profile first, and then cut those away with your table saw, making a pass on either side that comes to a point in the center, leaving the rabbet. then once the smaller stick profile is cut away, you do the integrated stick profile after. this will leave you with grain matched muntins since they all came from the same board.

you can do that if you so choose, the freud bits can be taken apart and the slot cutters removed if you want.

[Alex Horvath]

Thanks Neal,

It sounds like the Freud bits may be worth the extra $100.

One other thing - where the muntins cross on one example he says it's a half lap but on another drawing he just shows a cope - stick joint.

I assume a cope-stick joint is good enough?

I'll probably make a small practice "door" using poplar.

[John Downey]

African mahogany could be a wood you want to consider. I built a full paneled wall with two doors, and some of the wood was rift sawn or quarter right off the stack. The boards are usually wide, so if you plan your cuts you can get some rift or quarter out of a wide plain sawn board. There are three things to watch for with African mahogany though.

First is these funny cross grain fractures. There were a few in almost every board, and I was careful to avoid them for the stiles, rails you can usually cut around them. No idea why they were there, maybe I just got the bad luck at the yard that day. I wasn't short on lumber though, I'd planned about 25% overage and that was more than enough.

Second is color - the wood I got was all about the same color as genuine mahogany, but I've seen it finish out very, very blond before. Stain or a dyed finish might be necessary.

Third is tearout. This stuff has interlocked grain and low tensile strength, making tearout a fact of life. Either plan for lots of sanding, filling, or just living with it (tends to be small, not very noticable, but it wouldn't do on a table top), or spring for that helical cutter head you've always wanted. If you end up having to stain, this may accentuate the tearout, I was able to just oil it so what I left after sanding is not very noticable.

[Neal Clayton]

Thanks Neal,

It sounds like the Freud bits may be worth the extra $100.

One other thing - where the muntins cross on one example he says it's a half lap but on another drawing he just shows a cope - stick joint.

I assume a cope-stick joint is good enough?

I'll probably make a small practice "door" using poplar.

if your lumber is properly dry, it can even just be a miter. if you're talking about the "loose" muntins that are nailed in, that is.

opposite the glass rabbet you can cope and mortise them just like the rails, again the bits will do this for you, so you might as well use what they spit out, doing anything else adds an extra step.

another suggestion: make wide muntins. there's no need to try and emulate the pitifully small muntins in fake-light windows and doors anyways, the whole point of building your own is to have better than that ;). if you make a 1.25" wide muntin you can mortise from them and into them just fine.

[Alex Horvath]

Thanks Neal,

Most of my confusion was from the fact that the Freud 5 bit set is for simulated divided lites whereas the 3 piece set is for "full" lites.

It appears the extra 2 bits are for making the half lap muntin joints.

Funny thing thing is they don't really say this in the description but this is typical Freud.

The 3 bit set is abou $250 and that's a no-brainer. Like you said this does all the work for you.

[Henry Ambrose]

I think it might be time to get past "how to make something look like it is machine made".

We're kind of turning a circle and copying a machine made copy of what used to be made by hand.

So don't get too stuck on buying more bits.
Its a trap.
Maybe.

[Peter Quinn]

Alex, for exterior doors, the grill system (SDL simulated divided lite) might start to make sense. A single pane of insulated glass tends to be much cheaper than individual lites. Further there is far more labor involved in glazing all those individual lites and far more possibility of a failure. And there is a lot of labor involved in mitering all the glass stop on a multi lite door. Still, I think TDL doors win hands down for aesthetics. For interior doors the grill system is pretty much as cheap and tacky as it gets and I for one vastly prefer true divided lites.

At work we rip our glass rabbits on the TS. Taking out that much material with a rabbiting cutter, be it on a router or shaper is prone to problems and danger. I have used a coped carriage like Birchard recommends, and it works, but it does little to control tear out at that critical transition point between the molded area and what will become glass. You may also get more chatter that way. Maybe it is better with Freud's stacked slotters. They might act as a stagger tooth type stack, or more like a Shelix head? Worth a test run. If so you will need to make a coped carriage to move those bars past the cutter, which is easier with the verticals than the horizontals! There is an excellent description of this in Lonnie Birds shaper book that might be worth a look even if you are using a router table.

DO NOT rely on cope and stick joints for your muntons. You should make tennons on every bar that go deeper than the bottom of the glass rabbit, even if only 3/8" deep, it adds a lot of strength and greatly simplifies alignment at glue up.. Imagine trying to align every bar in your door, now covered with glue, in straight lines to form a series of perfect rectangles. If they don't come out square, mitering glass stop becomes a nightmare. Ours muntons typically have 1/4"X1/4"X3/8" tennons if the bars have a 1/4" flat. For the vertical muntons, except where they meet the top and bottom rails, the tennons are 1/2 the depth of the flats on the muntons (the flat face of the wood which is left after molding both sides), or in our case typically 1/8". Further, we typically glue ONLY the muntons initially, though we dry fit and clamp the stiles and rails at that point to act as cauls. Its easier than trying to glue up the whole enchilada at once.

One more helpful though is to use a layout stick (or punch stick) for laying out the stub mortises on rails, stiles and all horizontal bars. We make two perfect templates out of MDF (one for the stiles, on for the rails and horizontal bars) taking care to mark LEFT and RIGHT where appropriate, or TOP AND BOTTOM. We actually punch holes on the template with the mortiser, then screw these templates to each work piece and use them to "punch" the mortises in exactly the same relative location on every piece. This way on a french pair the bars line up side to side, top to bottom, and you stand a chance of everything coming out square. DO NOT SIMPLY MARK OUT YOUR MORTISES ON OUR PARTS WITH A PENCIL AND START HOGGING AWAY. That is the grease pole to French door hell and gross inaccuracy. DAMHIK. And Do be very anal about cutting all your parts to the right lengths and widths. 1/64" long and fat on each part on a 15 lite door will add up to a big problem.

PS: Yes you can get mahogany in vertical grain material. Mahogany is graded some what differently from domestic hardwoods. and I am no expert there, but I believe "Pattern Grade" is what you want to spec for QS or vertical grain material. Good luck and have fun.

[Alex Horvath]

Thanks Peter,

Excellent info.

Your description of the mortise accuracy reminds me of some high end lattice panels I made. No mortise and tenon, but spacers between the lattice strips.

I cut the 200 or so spacers using a miter stop system but still had to use a sander and a micrometer to get the length within a 64th or better! Even then I had to hope that any error was random enough so things would even out over 25 or so lattice strips. They never mention these issues in the books/plans!


And as far as hand tools vs. power, I like the process of woodworking but I confess I like the results even better. Does this make me a bad person?

[Neal Clayton]

I think it might be time to get past "how to make something look like it is machine made".

We're kind of turning a circle and copying a machine made copy of what used to be made by hand.

So don't get too stuck on buying more bits.
Its a trap.
Maybe.

i agree henry.

i have one set of cope/stick cutters, one table saw blade i use for both rips and crosscuts, and one set of dado blades.

i build all sorts of windows and doors with the above. it's really more about understanding the process than the tooling.

all of those freud door sets are essentially the same alex. you can take them apart and add/remove slot cutters and bearings and shims however you like. so it doesn't really matter which one you choose. you can accomplish the loose muntin by a table saw cut like i mentioned above if you want.

i agree with peter that on an interior door the muntins should be mortised. on an exterior door if the outside is to be glazed, the glazing putty and glass can hold the muntins in place, there are windows built this way that last for a century or more (although i mortise those as well), but for an interior door without glazing putty on the glass, the fixed side should be mortised.

the thing that makes all of this infinitely easier, btw, is a very detailed drawing. you can't really visualize all cuts in windows and doors, at least i can't. they must be precise, and with any sort of divided light design, accurate drawings make this infinitely easier. so brush up your sketchup skills before starting ;).

[Mike Cruz]

Sorry, I don't think I have much, if anything to add, about your question about bits, etc. This post just reminded me of French Doors I built in my last home. The doorways were rectangular, but I wanted arched, so I had some drywall work to do after framing in. They are made of Cherry and have hand made seeded glass from Germany. They were installed in the wall that divided our Living room and our kitchen and den. Even if this doesn't answer any of your questions, maybe it will give you some ideas. Thanks for posting this thread. It brought back a pleasant memory... :)

[Alex Horvath]

Sorry, I don't think I have much, if anything to add, about your question about bits, etc. This post just reminded me of French Doors I built in my last home. The doorways were rectangular, but I wanted arched, so I had some drywall work to do after framing in. They are made of Cherry and have hand made seeded glass from Germany. They were installed in the wall that divided our Living room and our kitchen and den. Even if this doesn't answer any of your questions, maybe it will give you some ideas. Thanks for posting this thread. It brought back a pleasant memory... :)

Beautiful, Mike and kudos for making it unique with the arch. I appreciate you posting this not only for design inspiration but it helps to know that I'm not the only homeowner doing this.

[Henry Ambrose]

snipped................


And as far as hand tools vs. power, I like the process of woodworking but I confess I like the results even better. Does this make me a bad person?


I was not making fun of you, sorry if it came off that way.
I do think that simplifying and going to handwork instead of a machine to do everything is more satisfying to me. Maybe not to everyone. And I do find it "funny" when we find our inspiration in something that is machine made.

Don't get me wrong -- I have loads of tools for lots of different kinds of work. I like/love tools and machines. But I also like to think of how things can be made simply, especially when a lot of machine tool set-up and tear-down time rears its head to do a task that can be done by hand in a few minutes.

At some point we become machine operators instead of craftsmen. And sometimes that's OK but I get tired of that pretty quick. Cutting something by hand and trimming to fit with a chisel is often more rewarding to me. So five of something calls me to handwork, one hundred pieces calls me to machines.

Make yourself happy. If you like running machines more then handwork - go for it. There's nothing wrong with that.

[Mike Cruz]

No problem. I only wish I could show you how I did it. So much of it is a blur. I didn't take pictures durring construction and I sure I don't still have the plans. I don't do any of my planning on the computer. I use the old pencil and graph paper method. I feel I get a great grasp of what I'm going to make if I have to draw it first. That way, I work the images into my mind. I can't see that happening on my computer. I know, don't knock it til ya try it...

I have to say, though, thank YOU, because you brought back a lot of memories about building them.