I'm making a couple of interior fire doors match the rest of the house. They're five-panel doors with 6" stiles, 4" cross rails and a 5 and 7 inch top and bottom rail respectively. The panels are ~ 10x24". I've milled the panels to 3/16" thick and the rails & stiles to 3/8". (The panels sit in a 3/16" rebate.) What I did was tack the whole thing together with hot-melt glue. Then I spread a coat of 2-part epoxy on the door itself, set the veneer on top and stuck it in a vacuum bag. Worked great, except for the epoxy coming through in a few spot.
Sooo...now for my question. For the next door I milled the panels to fit a little bit snugger in the rebate to avoid the glue squeezing through. (I'll also be a little more careful about not putting too much on.) Boss walked by and said that my panels now fit too tightly and he's concerned about wood movement, buckling, cracking the joints. My thinking was that a) the whole thing - panels, rails and stiles - is fully epoxied to the door underneath, b) the panel stock is less than
1/4" thick, and c) the wood's pretty moist already, seeing as it's summer in upstate New York. Given that, and my hoping to avoid some painstaking glue clean-up, I'd figured I'd be ok.Any of you Bruce Hoadley afficianados out there have any strong opinions? I just can't imagine this thing moving.
JP