Interior doors in-between 'featherweight' and 'fire door' quality?

[jkn]

Hi all I'm considering having a go at hanging some interior doors for the first time. I'm relatively confident of my skills with saw, drill & chisel etc. but had been slightly put off by the actual details of doing the hanging before. However now I've read through some of the uk.d-i-y archives I've decided to give it a go ;-) ...

I have a couple of questions though:-

- Are there any ranges of plain finish (play/veneer, suitable for painting) internal doors which are a bit beefier that the IMO ultra-light & flimsy standard ones, but aren't so solid/heavy as a fire door?

- just how much can you take down the sides, top & bottom of modern doors? The assitant at the timber merchant I was talking to today was suggesting no more than a few mm, which seems a bit minimal. I am fitting into some doorways which current have sliding doors, so I'm anticipating they may be non-standard sizes. Having a 'doorway tolerance' of say 10mm seems a bit off if the door widths come in steps of 3" ;-/

- I will have to fit a door stop (if that's the term) inside the old doorway. When is the best time to fit this - before hanging the door, or after?

OK, that's three questions, oops.

Thanks for any pointers Jon N

[Rob Morley]

Plain doors are really easy to make - just a couple of sheets of 6mm ply glued to a softwood frame. The only tricky bit is cutting the mortice for the catch (unless you use a surface-mounted catch, of course).

[John Rumm]

Yup, have a bash - simple enough! ;-)

The intermediate door would probably be the sol called "Solid Pine" things - i.e. real wood (ish) but not that heavy.

With the lightweight egg box things, you can probably have an inch of each side. Many doors will have cutting instructions with them, that will show the location of the internal blocks and hence how much you can take off.

I think he was being a tad over restrictive.

Always fit them after if you can - that way you can get a perfect fit against the door without any faffing about!

[John Rumm]

Use the internal tube type latches and they are dead easy to fit - just drill a 20mm hole with a spade bit into the edge, another through where the handles will go, and finally chisel a little rebate for the faceplate of the latch.

[Rob Morley]

For some reason I don't think of those as "proper" door hardware, probably because of the number of broken ones that I've encountered - can you get decent quality in that design?

[John Rumm]

I have only used a few and they have not been in service long enough for me to comment on the ultimate quality, although so far so good.

Still changing one is foing to be even simpler that fitting it in the first place ;-)

[Rob Morley]

Once you've got the door open ;^>

[jkn]

Hi guys Thanks for your comments:

John Rumm wrote:

Hmm, yeah. not the sort of thing I want really. I might have to stick with the standard ply finish ones, in the expectation that they are a bit better than the current hardboard ones!

That's what I hoped- thanks. (it was a she actually ;-/)

That was my plan - just wondered if there was any reason for doing it beforehand.

[...]

Like Rob, I've always found the style of mortice fitting you suggest to go with very poor quality, so I'm likely to be fitting something a bit better. We'll see ...

Thanks Jon N

[John Rumm]

Its only about another 15 mins work to fit a bigger one, so it does not make much difference either way... ;-)