French Door Weight

[Dennis McDonaugh]

I've got to make two french pocket doors 9 1/2 feet high and 36" wide and need a little help from someone with custom door experience.

I need to decide what type of wood to use (they'll be painted) and was thinking poplar or douglas fir, but my hardwood supplier doesn't stock fir thick enough for a door. Are there any other alternatives? Also, I have to order door hardware to make the pocket frame since I can't find any locally over 80" tall. How much do you think a door that size will weigh?

I'm thinking it'll be pretty straight forward using mortice and haunched tenon for construction of the door frame and since I don't have a way to do the complex moulding for a true divided light door I'm thinking of using a single piece of glass and a grill to get the look I'm after unless someone has an alternative that doesn't involve a set of expensive router bits that I'll only use once.

Thanks

[Bob Boake]

Not a custom door builder but have hung plenty of them. Most doors are not solid but are made of glued up components. This would work fine especially in a case where they will be painted.

just my opinion, but I would not go through the trouble of making custom doors to compromise the appearance with an applied grid.

Have you considered trying to modify existing door blanks to get the look you want? Something like taking a standard 36" 15 light door and then cutting a 6 light door down and glue, spline, floating tenon, biscuit join a 3 ft section on top of a cut down 7 foot standard door. pocket doors dont take the beating that hinged doors take and should hold up. Plus the outer edge will be concealed and you can connect however u want. A trip to an outlet with a variety of wooden doors might be worthwhile.

Another option would be to look for arch salvage stores for used commercial doors that could be adapted to your dimensions.

If you think a set of door router bits are expensive, wait till you price the wood and individual pains of tempered glass.

[Dennis McDonaugh]

Bob, you may have something there, I'll have to take a ride over to the Habitat for Humanity resale store to see what they have.

[Michael Perata]

Dennis

It is not an overly difficult task, but at 9.5' tall you need to be very concerned about planar stability. I would suggest building the stiles and rails by gluing up 3 or 4 laminates with the grain flipped every other laminate.

These doors will also be very heavy so I would budget a minimum of 4 preferrably 5 butts for each door. Additionally, you need to latch the top and bottom of each door with a cremone bolt. http://www.kilianhardware.com/kilian/lbbrascrembo.html
Good luck and post some .jpgs of your work.

[Chris Mann]

I'll second the rec to laminate 3 strips for each door. Makes it really easy to construct the door and you can design your floating (or non) tenons right into the construction of the laminates.

For the divided lights you can fake it. Create a grid work of just the straight inner part of the muntins and then use a round over or bead to create the outer edge for each part and glue and pin those to the grid. Put one side in with a spacer block and the other side in after you place the glass in. If you make your grid consistant and square then it's really easy to miter the bead parts into each grid. And if you do the laminate construction you can place the grid into the opening instead of having ot rabbit it in later. You'll need to use a longer open time glue though.

-chris

[Pete Rowley]

Not a custom door builder but have hung plenty of them.

Well that's one way to reduce the competition :eek: