My house still has some of the original 100 year old paneled, pine doors. Unfortunately, they are all warped to some degree. Is there any way to fix this?
- posted
14 years ago
My house still has some of the original 100 year old paneled, pine doors. Unfortunately, they are all warped to some degree. Is there any way to fix this?
I think it's doubtful. If it took 100 years for them to get warped I don't think they are going to straighten very easily. You could try to put a 2x4 under each end and then with the high side up add weight until it's flat (or even a little past) or until you hear things cracking. Let one sit for a few days and see what happens. I'm afraid they will just return to the warp. There are few other things you could try. If you have some doors of the same size and swing, move them around to see if one fits better in a different jamb. It's possible in a 100 year old house that the walls have moved some and some of the openings may be straighter than others. You might also try to move the door stop around on the jamb to make your warped doors close better. This doesn't fix anything but instead of the top hanging out, the bottom might be moved in.
Mike O.
Place the door on the grass for a few hours on a sunny day. The side against the grass will expand somwhat. Of course this doesn't always work as expected, but it will correct some warp.
"Jimbo" wrote
I doubt whether this is a realistic solution, but the tradesman's advice is to find which rail/stiles are concave, cut narrow grooves across the rails and insert wedges to straighten same.
Hardly, cosmetic and Jimbo might need to cut many grooves.
Jeff
One good treatment, three bad ones. Check the door frames, maybe the doors are straight and the frames aren't. You can remove the trim around the doorframes and re-shim 'em straight and square.
Disassemble the doors (by loosening the glue joints) and reassemble with modern glue in fully-flat configuration (might take some judicious re-cutting of the mortises and a void-filling glue like Liquid Nails). If it's just a few bad chunks of wood, you might make five good doors from six twisted ones by mixing parts.
Run the doors, whole, through a drum-sander to flatten them, and refinish.
Apply heat and moisture to reverse the warp, stabilizing the wood with PEG (polyethylene glycol). Unless the doors were made with inferior (non-dry or non-straight-grain) lumber, this will be a last resort.
Like I say, those last three options are ... bad. I'd hit a salvage yard for used doors, first.
It is definitely the doors that are warped. In one case, the warp was minor and I "negated" it by adjusting the position of the stop.
Disassembling them will be very difficult as they are a fairly complex assembly with 4 rails each so a lot of large M&T joints.
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