Frame and Panel Doors

[ed cessna]

I ‘m in the process of making two frame and panel doors out of cherry. To get matching panels, I resawed them from one piece of wood. The resulting panels look gorgeous. However, there is one problem. One of the panels has two cracks, one 2" and the other 2 1/2." The cracks are completely through the ½" panel and about a sheet of paper wide. Can I fill the cracks and save the panel? If so, what do I use as filler?
:)
Thanks for the help.
Ed

[Steve Clardy]

Hi Ed.

Are the panels already cut to width?

[J.R. Rutter]

I use super glue and sawdust for thin cracks like that. I really like FastCap's system of different viscosity CA bases and accelerator. Check the other panel carefully in the same spots and soak some super glue into the end grain there as well.

[Raymond Stanley]

I'm very much a newbie, but I did see something cool that Georgia and Mira Nakashima used when they had cracks in their huge panels that they made into tables and benches.

If you look real close at this picture, you can see it in the close right-hand corner of the board:
http://www.nakashimawoodworker.com/bench.htm

It is a chunk of wood like two male ends of a sliding dovetails back to back, that go into female sliding dovetail slots in the large board.

The chunk of wood looks approximately like this:

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Don't know if this will be useful, but thought it couldn't hurt to share it.

[ed cessna]

Steve,

No the panels have not yet been cut to final size.

Ed

[Steve Clardy]

Have you got enough width to saw it down the crack and reglue the panel back together

[Dave Morris]

That trick has saved a panel or two for me. It cuts out the crack you can see and also the portion you *can't* see with the naked eye (or fill with glue, sawdust, etc.). If you are lucky and the crack is traveling in the right direction, the kerf of one pass with the sawblade eats up the crack, a couple passes at most. Problem is, these panels are bookmatched. That further complicates an "invisible" fix since this would alter matching grain patterns. Then again, I've seen fixes where a contrasting material like colored epoxy was used to fill and accentuate the crack instead of trying to hide it, as a way of turning a flaw into a design element.

Look close, does the crack exist on a smaller scale in the opposite panel? Might help in your choice of how to deal with the problem.