Meddle Linnet Summers

Let’s finish this door we started (writing about) yesterday. It’s another quick and dirty job, made from this and that and t’other.

This is the point where I admit embarrassing things. I don’t have a lot of router bits. I have a lot of routers, for some reason, but not a lot of router bits. It’s one of life’s great mysteries, like who’s still watching House of Cards. I need a big rabbeting bit, and I don’t have one. I do have a big straight bit. For some reason, I have a router fence. It came with one of the many routers, I suppose. So we want to make a 3/4″ x 3/4″ rabbet along the inside edges of the stiles and rails. If there was a bearing on the end of the bit, we could just run it around the insides and be done with it. But we can set the fence for the width of the stiles and rails, less the 3/4″ we’re hogging out, and run it around from the outside edges. Like this:

It’s quick work in the spruce/pine/fir framing lumber. We’ll have to square off the corners with a chisel and mallet, but that’s pretty easy. It ain’t oak. Then we come to the curved rail. Dammit.

My evil plan has come a cropper. We’ll have to improvise further. We fish around in the waste pile for the cut-off piece from the top stile. It’s the mirror shape of the top curve. We attach it to a nasty scrap of pine, and sit that on top of two blocks of wood. If you take the fence off the router, and measure correctly (the second time, generally), the base of the router will butt against the edge of the cut-off scrap and you can make the rabbet on the curved stile lickety split. Then you burn the scraps and cut-offs for heat, because you’re never going to make another one of these things again.

Now we’re going to salvage all the beaded tongue and groove lumber from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzbarndoor. You’ll be disappointed to hear that this reminds me of an old story.

A fellow has a big walnut tree in his yard. He reads in the newspaper that a walnut tree is worth big money as lumber. He calls the local, very Yankee, old-timey sawmill dude and asks him to come over and make him what he assumes will be an offer with many zeros at the end of it.

The sawyer rolls out of his battered pickup truck, and stands in the fellow’s yard, looking at his suburban home and yard. He’s not even looking at the tree. The homeowner speaks first.

“That tree is a beauty, isn’t it? I bet it’s worth a fortune.”

“It’s not.”

“What do you mean? It’s fifty feet tall, at least. It’s straight as an arrow. You can get all sorts of expensive lumber out of it.”

“Nope.”

“Why the hell not?

“Meddle linnet summers.”

“What the hell does that mean? Trees don’t meddle. It’s just standing there. There are birds in it, but they’re not linnets, and that shouldn’t matter anyway. And You can cut it down in the fall, if the summer is a problem.”

“No thanks. Meddle linnet summers.”

“Can’t you explain yourself  better than that? What does that mean?”

“Tree’s the same age as the house, ayuh. Grew up with it. You, or the guy you bought it from, has been pounding nails, and screwing hooks, and generally using that tree for your own private corkboard for half a century. Can’t have it in my mill. Meddle linnet summers.”

The sawyer climbs in his truck, and drives away, leaving the homeowner scratching his head, and chanting the mysterious words, until he finally figures it out. There’s metal in it somewhere.

So I’m salvaging 110-year old millwork, that was made from 300-year-old-trees, I’ll bet. I know damn well there’s meddle linnet summers. So I pick the lumber over pretty well, and pull out any number of things I’d rather not hit me in the face at the table saw, or dull the blade in the chop saw. I cut out the rotten parts, and use the short ones on the bottom of the door, and save the longer ones for the top. I lay them in and fit them as I go.

It turned out OK, all in all. There was just enough lumber to finish the door.

You may have noticed that two center stiles have mysteriously appeared. This is where I admit additional embarrassing things. It’s a pain in the ass to assemble a four-panel cruciform door. I cheated and made two big horizontal panels, and then nailed 3/4″-thick stiles to the panels in the center. It’s one of the reasons I left a 3/4″ reveal on the front, and skipped making the chamfers you saw on the plans.

We painted it in the shop. The fluorescent light makes the color look ghastly. It’s a subdued, tawny brick color called Mayflower Red.

We put an old thumb latch on the beast, and hung it on gate hinges with bearings, so it won’t sag and swings smoothly.

A big hook and eye holds the door from banging around while you’re in the shed,  where you’re no longer looking for the shed stick.

Every time we open that shed door, I mumble “Ahhh.” Doors that open and shut and close properly and that don’t need a stick are a pleasure to operate, every time. You should make yourself one. It’s not that hard. But buy a rabbeting bit. I’m a cautionary tale, not an example, people.

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Get the Stick! Good Boy

So, during yesterday’s side porch extravaganza, I’m sure a couple of readers said to themselves, “Oh, that Sippican. He’s putting in perforated drainage pipe just to move a little rainwater five feet further from the house. That Sippican! Overkill is his middle name.”

Well, my middle name is actually @#$%ing, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s examine the facts, your honor, and see if this overkill is required. That first photo in today’s diatribe is the shed that’s tacked on the side of my basement basement, the one we just lifted 6 or 8 inches the other day. The opposite end of that shed is where the perforated pipe drain is buried. It shows the rough and ready doors the last occupants left for us. It had an old-fashioned hasp on it. It was meant for a padlock, but it had a twig stuck in it instead.

I used to grow peevish with my kids from time to time (alright, daily), and would say, “Where’s the shed stick? How could you lose the shed stick?” It almost never occurred to me to get another shed stick. I figured once I started breaking off a repacement twig from the surrounding flora, there’s be no end to it. Maine would be as flat as a parking lot in no time. But in the spirit of familial amity, and because divorce lawyers cost more than lumber, I decided to replace the door and do without the stick forevermore.

Let’s open those doors in the spring, and see what’s inside.

Hey look. Four or five inches of solid ice.

Well, I can see we won’t be mowing the lawn, or sitting down, until Memorial Day at the earliest. That’s why you take care of drainage when you get a chance, people. We moved that rainwater five feet, and it’s as dry as a bone in that shed now. But the shed needed a real, architecturally appropriate, twigless door. Let’s make one.

Now, you must know me by now, and you know I’m not going to spend money I don’t have. I cast a longing eye towards the fragment of one of the old barn doors we’d scavenged from the dump pile. That’s the back side of it. The front is beaded. The edges of the boards are tongue and groove, which makes for a great door. It keeps out rain and wind and skeeters and such naturally. I think the wood is chestnut. It’s basically an extinct species now, destroyed by a blight. They used to make darn near everything out of chestnut. Phone poles, horse stalls, furniture, fence rails, and anything else that needed cheap timber. It looks like the love child of oak and pine. It’s light, strong, easy to work, and doesn’t rot. Great stuff. Like most great stuff, there isn’t any anymore.

The door needs a plan. Let’s make one. Please remove yourself from the area if you’re skittish. I’ll be using a pencil and paper to make a plan. While not technically illegal yet, no one seems to be able to do it anymore. It’s computing or bust nowadays. I know how to do a little CAD drawing. I hate it, and it’s slower, and I can’t be bothered to wait five minutes for the tubes in the old Dell to warm up and ask me if I’d rather update Windows again now, or almost now. Scratch away and be done with it, I say. Here’s the plan:

Nobody pays attention to them anymore, but doors are supposed to have proportions. The stiles (upright members), the rails (cross members), and the panels need to look right and be strong enough to do their jobs. Since everything is stamped out of plastic or sawdust and glue these days, they hurl the rules down and stomp on them and make swollen misshapen everythings. But the rules were helpful back in the day. Lumber still comes mostly in dimensions that are useful for following the rules of proportions.

This door is a good example. We’ll make the frame out of leftover pieces of framing lumber. The bottom rail from a 2 x 8, the top rail from a 2 x 12, and the intermediate rail and stiles from 2 x 6s. Where do we locate the middle rail? We use another useful rule of thumb, the Golden Ratio. The easiest way to use it is to simply multiply the short dimension by 1.6 to get the long dimension. We know the bottom panels are @15-3/4″ wide, because that’s what’s left over from the stiles, divided in half. Multiply by 1.6, and you get something close to 24 inches. The arch at the top is a little more complicated. It’s a curve sprung from a point located near the center of the door. There are lots of ways to lay out arches, especially pointed arches, using just a compass. I probably just futzed it by springing a line that left 5 -1/2″ at the top center, and the full 11 – 1/4″ where the top rail meets the side stiles. This is how you find the spot on the door plan to plant the peg of the compass to draw the arc. I drew in some chamfers (the shaded areas surrounding the panels). I notice that spell check doesn’t know what the hell to make of the word “chamfer.” It’s lonesome knowing more words than the dictionary.

I know from experience that drawing any curved line with CAD programs is a more vexing problem than a sober prom date with a Navy Seal father. That’s why we still scratch away at the cottage. Saves time. And we ignore the spell check.

So we cut the top, middle, and bottom rails on the chop saw with a stop block on the fence, so they all turn out the exact same length. Forget measure twice, cut once. Measure once, put a stop block on the fence, and cut three times, and you’re done. If they’re wrong, they’re all the same kind of wrong, dammit. We  marked out the curve by banging a nail in the workbench, tying a string to it, tying a pencil to the other end, and pulling it around the curve. The string has to be the correct length, of course. The plan is on graph paper for a reason. You can just measure off it, three inches to a block. We cut the curve on the band saw.

Here’s the real hard part if you’re following along at home. You’re going to have to shoplift a domino joiner. No sane person would buy one, they cost like a grand now. It cost about half that when I bought mine. So don’t get caught, and steal some of those beech tenons while you’re at it, like the one you see in the picture. The tool makes a perfect mortise, and the beech domino is the perfect tenon for the mortise. Of course you can always cut the mortises and tenons with chisels and gent’s saws if you’re planning on living to be 10,000 years old, but for normal people, it’s shoplifting or nothing.

So every place the stiles meet the rails, you can see two tick marks where the domino tenons will go. We use the largest tenons we have, and glue them with exterior glue. It’s plenty strong. We’ll tighten up the joints with bar clamps and then back up the tenons with star point screws driven at an angle. The screws aren’t really necessary, but you can take the door out of the clamps right away if you use them. Screws make great clamps.

The speed square is placed in the corner to make sure the door is square. You can also check the door by pulling tape measures from corners to opposite diagonal corners, and comparing the two measurements. It’s a waste of time in this case. The door basically can’t go together without going together squarely.

[We’ll get back to making this door tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who reads, comments, buys my book, or hits the tip jar. It is greatly appreciated]