Exterior metal door with wood core - needs repair @ bottom

[millinghill]

Hi, I have an exterior metal entry door and noticed that the doorsweep fell off the bottom. When I looked closer, I realized that the interior of the door is made of wood and the bottom INTERIOR frame of the door had rotted out completely and fallen away.

Photo here:

Rest of the door works fine and is solid so, ideally, I would like to just chisel out a little more of the rotten wood from the bottom, and replace with a new piece of wood in order to make it solid again.

Has anyone had similar experience with such a door? Any pros/cons to repair? Maybe use treated wood with stainless screws? Thanks Theodore

[trader_4]

To chisel it out to fit a new piece will be very difficult. I would remove the rot, scrape it out, then fill it with epoxy body filler. Sand it after a few minutes when it's hard, but still not super hard. You can get a quart of filler at Walmart for $8 or so. If the void is so large that you can fit in a new piece of pressure treated wood, you could do the filler first, then the new piece of wood.

[micky]

No. not with the wood part. My door's aluminum flange got bent up and I had to rebend it so it would slide into the threshhold.

Most cons end back in prison after a few years.

Is it wet a lot? How old was the door? If you use treated wood, be careful not to breathe the sawdust, but if the non-treated wood lasted

20 years or more, that seems good enough.

For that matter, the major purpose of the bottom piece of wood is to hold the sweep. If you're not going to replace the sweep itself, a piece of foam rubber or styrofoam placed firmly, or with caulking, in the spot will be insulating just as well as wood, but you may well have a cold breeze under that.

They probably sell sweeps separately. If not, maybe you can find a junk door, like at a Habitat store, or some other place that sells used building material and take out it's bottom piece of wood complete with the sweep. OTOH, my door has a metal piece that slides into a groove in the threshold, and that's probably more wind-resistant that the sweep that fell off. I'm sure uyou can can buy one of those separately if you're willing to redo the threshhold.