Pocket screws and interior doors

[Chris Martin]

Hi all. I'm contemplating building a handful of interior doors for the shack and I'm wondering if it would be wise to use pocket screws to connect rail to stile rather than the more traditional dowel or mortise-tenon joinery. I can certainly assemble a door more quickly using screws (and glue). But...is a door put together this way up to the wear-and-tear that doors are subject to? I'm thinking yes, but I'd certainly like a few other opinions before I stumble forward with my plans.

Thanks.

Chris Martin

[Bay Area Dave]

are you gonna try to hide the screws with plugs? I use pocket screws all the time, but not for anytime they would be visible.

dave

[Leon]

Considering the weight involved and movement I would advise against using pocket hole screws.

[Brian]

Standard rail and stile router bits do the job - double sided bits are available too, so you can do everything in one pass. I like to reinforce the joints with dowels, too, though. It is fairly quick with dowel center punches. Pocket holes would look ugly even if plugged. Perhaps if you were going to laminate each rail and stile and hid the pocket holes on the inside lamination, it would be OK, but that's going overboard for an interior door and would be more work.

Brian.

[Wilson]