I have been contemplating making some six panel cherry doors for my house. Where do I find router bits to produce the rails and styles? Also, would it be posible to have oak on one side and cherry on the other? I maintain the same humidity level year round.
Joe Phillips
Plastics pay the bills, Woodworking keeps me sane!
Replies
Joe,
There are several manufacturers that make rail and stile sets..for both doors and windows. Yesterday I watched the CMT vendor at the WoodWorks show in Springfield, MA. He made a 4000 square foot house in about 10 minutes with nothing more than CMT router bits and router table...they make it look so easy. You might want to google on CMT, Freud, Whiteside....Woodcraft, etc.
As far as creating doors of dissimilar woods..oak on one side, cherry on the other (for instance) I suspect you could only do that with flush doors using veneers. If you took two raised panels (one oak, one cherry) sliced them down the middle and glued oak to cherry the woods would expand and contract at different rates....which at the very least would create warp and twisting....
"He made a 4000 square foot house in about 10 minutes with nothing more than CMT router bits and router table..."
Damn I wanna meet this guy! ;-)
LOL! That can't possibly mean what I think it means, so it must mean something else. What do suppose it could be?
For interior doors, if the RH is stable all year, I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work. You'd want to make sure the wood MC was stable in the same environment before you do your final shaping. If you're not facing a tight deadline, it might make sense to work up some test panels, or perhaps a 16" square one panel door, and see what happens.
Two woods might even work in a situation where the RH did change throughout the year, like on an entry door, if you picked two woods with similar shrinkage charcteristics, used quarter sawn wood, and kept all the components fairly narrow.
Joe,
Flat sawn oak moves 50% more than flat sawn cherry so a glued up panel of the two woods would be under stress with any moisture change. Unless you have a museum grade HVAC system in your house the relative humidity can't be absolutely stable and in any case hoping for stable humidity isn't an argument that should be used to get around good design.
Anyway, there's a very simple solution for the panels, don't glue the two halves of the panels together, then they can expand and contract at their own rate without creating stress.
For the door frame, the difference in expansion between quarter sawn red oak and cherry isn't that great, so a sandwich of the two, if the rails and stiles weren't especially wide, would probably work. White oak moves more than red so it wouldn't be as good a choice for the frame.
I looked in CMT and a few other catalogs and couldn't find cutters for making double faced doors 1 1/4 inches thick, by the time you get to that size you should be considering using a shaper. In a pinch you could probably use router bits for cabinet doors by taking a pass from both faces of the stock but you would have to be very careful to get everything to line up. properly.
John w.
Sounds like it might work -- disssimilar woods and all. But it sounds to me like you are already planning which doors will be usually standing open, and which will normally be kept closed.
As for the ones that will normally be standing open, will it matter all that much what kind of wood is on the back side?
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