So here we are, end of January and the door is not yet completed. Yes, it is taking longer than anticipated, but then I had to miss a few weeks’ lessons (knee problems). Still, progress there is and here are a few photos documenting it.
Since last update, the door has been sculpted around the edge to fit in the door frame (well, I hope it’s going to fit in the frame – that’s what all the measuring was for). I wish I could tell you how we did that, but honestly, I can’t remember exactly which machine we used. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the multi-tool bench because wandering around with the door would be something I’d remember. It weighs a ton.
Then we knocked up the central panel out of another couple of pieces of oak. Not too taxing. This has been cut to the right size. After which, it was time to turn our attention to the mouldings. You can think of these as picture frames if you like, and they go around the window and around the central panel on both sides of the door. This is where the door gets all decorative. The moulding for the central panel actually drops partly inside the lower hole, as you can see on the photos of the section. In this way there is a transition from the outer thickness of the door to the thinner panel in the middle of it. You have a certain amount of latitude as to how these mouldings are going to look, but you are constrained by the knives you have available for the multi-tool spindle shaper device. This is known in French as “la toupie” or “top”. It is essentially a spinning high-speed knife. You present your length of wood to it, and the form of the knives scoops out the shape to leave you with a moulding. You can vary the shape by raising or lowering the rotating knives and by deciding how deep you want them to cut.
To get our mouldings, we had to choose a likely piece of wood to cut the initial blanks from. We are having to husband the wood quite closely. Compared to the amount you buy initially, it is amazing how quickly it disappears when you try to make something out of it. A large quantity of it ends up as sawdust. In fact, our wood husbandry has been so important that we had to get two mouldings out of the thickness of each piece of wood. It would have been convenient to cut the thicknesses into two with the circular saw, but the width of the cut is 6mm which was considered wood we could ill-afford to lose, so Jean-David cut the blanks with the band-saw. I’d have done it myself, but I was advised that if I strayed from the line by a millimetre, I’d be shot. Using the band-saw is a slightly zen-like experience at the best of times, ensuring that you don’t deviate from the line, but I didn’t want to waste my valuable wood by making a hash of it.
Once we had the blanks, we had to cut them to the rough shape with the circular saw, then they went three times through the spindle-shaper, and were worked on once with the “défonceuse” which is hand-wielded power tool like an electric drill. The finished mouldings are then carefully measured and the ends cut at 45° to make the final frame.
So now the next job is to make the mouldings for the bigger hole on the outside and to construct the window frame to carry the mirror window on the inside. As an aside, I am pretty chuffed with the decorative effect of the wood grain. There are some real flames going up the sides of the door. Very high quality oak can be a little homogenous and uninteresting; this is not a problem I have here.
The door is edged to that it will fit flush in the doorframe
Two halves of central panel are glued together
This scrofulous-looking piece of oak is what the lower mouldings are made from
One of the mouldings prior to being cut at 45°
The finished mouldings are mounted to see if they fit. Which they do, perfectly.
