door

[hudebnik]

I was hoping to get to bed earlier, but I was working on installing a new (old) door between the porch and living room. Drilled out suitable holes for latch mechanism, unscrewed hinges from old door and screwed them into the rabbets I had cut in the new door, wrestled the door into place, and... it was too tall by 3/8". More specifically, the hinge side of the door was too tall by 3/8", while the latch side was fine (I guess I must have assumed it was rectangular, without checking, when I cut 4" off the bottom a month ago). So I sawed off a wedge tapering from 3/8" down to zero from the top edge. Realized that since I had measured the position of the top hinge from the top rather than the bottom, the position of the top hinge was now wrong. Measuring down from the new top and up from the middle hinge gave me consistently incompatible answers, so I screwed the whole hinge into the door frame to see where it actually ended up on the door. Got the bottom and middle hinges to mate nicely, and put in their pins to hold them there. Still haven't screwed the top hinge into the door, but marked where its screw holes need to be. Then tried to close the door, and... the hinge side is still too tall, by a fraction of an inch. I took it down with a rasp until it would mostly close, then discovered that the latch side doesn't quite fit laterally, as though the door were 1/8" too wide. It was already after 11 PM, so I decided to leave that for tonight or tomorrow.

Update 29 Nov: After several rounds of chiseling out rabbets for hinges, moving screw-holes a fraction of an inch, and planing edges of the door (one of which was stopped by an inset steel part that I haven't figured out how or whether to remove), the door is now on its hinges, and it closes. The latch and doorknobs aren't installed yet, but I've confirmed that the latch is capable of latching in its current location, so that should be easy. Except... I'm not sure what to do with the old door-plates. They're several inches below the new doorknob location (they were at a normal height before I cut several inches off the bottom of a very tall door), and they have a hole for only a single spindle, not the spindle and two screws that the modern doorknob assembly has, and I don't know what kind of hole is behind them. But shalmestere would really prefer that the doorknob go through the door-plates, and it would look less hacky.

Comments

[franksdottir]

So did you get the door installed to your specifications yesterday? Hope all went well.

[hudebnik]

Not yet: in fact, it's out on the front porch again, awaiting 1/4" of narrowing. To which end I finally installed an electric bench grinder that I bought years ago, and used it last night to sharpen a chisel and a plane blade. Tonight I see whether the sharpening worked, and try to make the door narrower so it can fit in the doorway.