Qx2... Doors and finishes

Doors. I plan to build a folding dry bar. The bar will have two doors at the rear which open out to support the bar top. The doors are deep, about ten cms. To have them close with a small gap, I shall have to taper the two closing faces. I suspect that there's a "rule of thumb" somewhere applied to double doors ? How can I work out the taper to be applied? Or, maybe there's another way?

Finishing. When the bar is assembled there will be many places where access by hand is difficult - maybe impossible. Pigeon hole type locations. These places will be very difficult to apply stain and finishes. Is it 'practical' to apply the finishes before assembly? If I do, how do I avoid damaging the finish when applying glue? Is there an alternate method? John Hewitt Malaga Spain

Reply to
John Hewitt
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Fit the doors so that they both fit closely when you drop them in. Then hang the doors and close one of them. Close the other onto it - it won't close since the diagonal of the door is greater than its width. Mark top and bottom where it meets the closed door, and join the marks down the rear of the meeting stile. Remove the door, joint the outer top corner to its corresponding markon the inner top corner. Repeat for the lower corner, and join the top and bottom inner marks down the length of the stile The you can either take a bevel gauge and set it to the marks and use it to set up your jointer fence (take very light cuts), or you can mount it in a vice and hand-plane to the marks.

If you require the ability to open either door first, you'll have to repeat the whole process with the other door.

It's quite common to have to prefinish some pieces before assembly, for the reasons you describe. If you apply your finish then wax the components, the glue will not stick to the waxed surfaces and will be easy to clean off when dry. Don't use excessive glue, to avoid undue squeeze-out. Use a PVA adhesive so that you can clean any excess with a damp cloth. You may have to wrap it around a pointed stick if you can't get to it easily with your hands.

It goes without saying that you need to keep your wax away from the jointing surfaces (ie, those areas which need to be glued)

Cheers,

Frank

Reply to
Frank McVey

IF you can have the _back_ side of the doors flush with the front of whatever they're mounted to, it becomes a non-issue. no need for any taper.

For the other extreme, where the _front_ of the door is flush with the frame, then, the diagonal measure, from the front side of the door at the hinge edge, to the back side of the door at the far edge, must be no more than the width across the front of the door.

The easiest way to build this is to figure out how wide the back side needs to be. The infamous Pythagorean Theorem gives us that answer.

square root of (door_width **2 - door thickness **2)

Example: if the door width is 60cm, with a thickness of 10 cm, then sqrt( 60*60 - 10*10 ) = 59.16+

Thus, the taper needs to trim off 8.5 mm at the back of the door, in order for it to close cleanly. Less than 8.5mm, and the doors will bind; If it's more than 8.5mm, its only a cosmetic issue -- people are more likely to notice that the edge isn't 'square'.

Not only practical, but probably a "GOOD IDEA(tm)"

(A) carefully mask off the areas where the glue _will_ be applied, while doing the staining and other finishing -- you want to preserve the 'raw' wood surface for the glue to bind to in the joints.

(B) when ready to assemble, remove the masking from the glue surfaces, AND MASK OFF the finished side of the pieces at the point of the join.

(C) use the glue _sparingly_. as in 'just enough to do the job'. this minimizes the squeeze-out, and thus the need for any post-gluing clean-up. do -lots- of practicing on some scrap stock. :)

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

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