One of my many contacts in the local equestrian community recently commissioned twelve locker doors for the new lounge he built in the second story of the farm's stable building. He's a reasonably skilled carpenter himself, but his primary time focus is re-training off-track thoroughbred horses for the Hunter show ring and pleasure use. So I got the nod. "Sadly", he already chose pine for his locker structures and surrounding trim...it was easy because that's what the home centers sell in "one by" material. Anyone who has built doors of any kind know that "flat" is everything and there was no way I was going to build what he wanted in the quality and strength he wanted using that same "one by" material from the lumber yard, even if it was the supposedly "good stuff" offered by a local independent yard.
So the first order of business was obtaining material that was "worthy"...a thankless task it seems...as clear pine is expensive and only distributed by a few places to more local suppliers. I also had to buy a "lot" of the material that was in excess of what I really needed by about 30%...and at $5.25 a board foot for the 5/4 I required. The extra will get used, but really...oak would have been less expensive and easier to work with. At any rate...it arrived after about a week of waiting for my order and I picked it up.
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I broke it down upstairs in my lumber storage area to manageable lengths for milling. Here's the first batch. I later had to go back and do this again because, um...twelve doors require twice as much as six doors and well, math...
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After measuring moisture, I determined that I was going to have to take this slow. It was a little higher than I prefer and you know...doors. In the end, these piles got processes at least three time.
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Which filled this up many times...
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Once I was happy that my components were flat and straight (and I did manage that), some crosscutting to component length ensued...
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And that left me this pile of "fun to come" after milling the slot for the knotty pine plywood panels (operation not shown but a "plywood thickness" bit was used for the slots)
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