Make Quality Doors Session 5: Tips for Making Small Doors

The parts that we've been working with so far here on the router table have been 2" wide rails and stiles and those are very easy to handle as 2" wide pieces. Sometimes you get into a project that calls for narrower rails and stiles. When I work with stuff that's gonna be down around an inch and half, I don't like working with those narrow parts, from a safety perspective and an ease of handling perspective. But there is a great workaround. And the workaround is starting with big pieces for the router table work, that will later go the table saw to make into narrow pieces. He's where I'm at with this. This one piece is going to become both of my door rails. This one piece is gonna become both of my door stiles. Here's what is really critical about this. Whatever my cumulative width is of those two parts, so inch and half, inch and half, cumulative width would be three. I want to make sure that the part I'm starting with is wide enough that I can get both of those pieces plus some saw kerfs, the slot that the blade makes, over at the table saw. It's really important that the two edges have been made parallel. So real typical squaring up my materials stuff. Joint an edge, rip to width, joint this edge, then cut to length. Cut to length is really important 'cause we want to make sure that of course, the end is dead square, like it should always be on a rail, and the overall length of this is the finish length of my rails. Similarly on our stile piece. It's plenty wide to get our two stiles ripped out of it. Afterward, make sure that the ends are cut square. Then we'll come back later and rip our stiles out of this after the laundering cuts are done. So here's what this is gonna look like on the router table. My end grain cutter is already in. What will happen then, when I make this cut is. I'm basically cutting both of my rail ends at one time on each end of my piece. I gotta swap out my end grain cutter for the long grain cutter and we'll finish up the router table work on these two parts. Here's what's goin' on. Long grain cut, work you've already seen. Difference is from what we've done before, we're running that long-grain cut on both edges of our piece because again, where we're goin' with this is we're gonna go to the table saw and rip narrow parts out of it. Now while we have this piece still looking like this, let's talk about another application of what we're doin'. Sometimes you have a door that's so tall, for instance for a pantry in a kitchen, that you don't want to have one single raised panel. You want to divide that space in two vertically. What that calls for is a rail in the center of the door that separates the upper panel from the lower panel and it's gonna look just like this. We're gonna have the end grain cut on both ends and a long-grain cut on both edges, so this meeting the stiles in the center, panel above, panel below. So the work we're doin' here is also applicable to something like that. Let me do the long grain cuts on this guy and then we gonna head for the table saw. Easy mental error to make, be sure that this piece gets spun around. Keep that routed edge against the fence. This is such a great way to handle door parts that are required for real narrow rails and stiles, like we have here. They're such a comfort level from working with these wide pieces and then coming back and ripping 'em to their narrow widths later. It's just so much greater than trying to work with narrow parts on the router table and honestly, I think it's gonna give you better results too. 'Cause it's just plain easier to work with wide parts than narrow parts. So, next time you got a project, that calls for narrow rails and stiles, check this procedure out using double-wide pieces to then cut later to get the narrow pieces that you need. When you buy the router bits to make your doors, it's really important that you match the set to the thickness of material that you're gonna work with. Cabinet doors are very commonly 3/4" or so thick. But when we do smaller-scale projects, maybe a jewelry box, often we're gonna work with material that's thinner, 1/2", 5/8. If we take that large bit and try to put it into that thinner wood it's just not gonna work. So let's have a look at this bit set. What I want to talk about here are smaller scale doors and take you through what it takes to make a small scale door. The bits I have here should look very similar, 'cause we've still got copin' style goin' on. We've still got a horizontal panel raiser with a back cutter. But look at that cutter and look at this cutter. Let me get this guy out of the way. Here's a long-grain cutter for 3/4" stock, long-grain cutter for thinner stock. You can see that they've just taken the whole profile and they've shrunk it, they've scaled it down, so that it fits in our thinner material. What we're gonna do is walk through makin' a door with these bits. I'm not gonna do every set of the procedure 'cause you've seen it. The really good news is the setup is identical. The other thing we'll be doin' here is working with pieces that are going to be pretty narrow. So like we've already done, I'm starting with wide pieces from which we'll later cut narrow stock, you've already seen that happen. So I'm gonna start the same way we always do. Get the end grain cutter set up and the router table and then we'll start workin' on a small scale door. Here's where we're at with the router table. The height of the cutter is correctly set, the ball bearing is in line with the face of the fence, we have our material ready and again, we're gonna work on two narrow pieces that will come out of that wide piece, like you've already seen. So we're ready to make a cut. It's a great opportunity here to give you a little bit of perspective 'cause my backer board is 3/4" stock. So lookin' at these two pieces you can see the scale of this profile and this thinner material, compared to the 3/4" stock we were using earlier. That bit's ready to come out and we can do our long grain cut. That takes care of our long grain cuts. I did, while you were away, go ahead and add my X's to the back of the pieces like we've talked about earlier. Now I'm gonna run these through the table saw, rip 'em down, get my panel ready, and we'll have a look at that panel raising so we can see the finished result of our small-scale door. All right, let's see what we got out of this process. Working with cherry here, it's one of my favorite woods. I like how it looks, I like how it smells, I like how it machines. There we go. So the lesson out of this really is that, what I really want you to take away from this, is that the process is really the same as what we've already done on our other doorframes and door panels. The real key to this is that, when you're scaling the doors down you need to scale the bits down, if you scale the doors up, for instance, if you choose to make passage doors for your house, they're typically inch and 3/8 thick, an exterior door could be as thick as inch and 3/4. So you want to make sure that you get a bit set that scaled up for doors like that. But again, even with those, the process is very similar to what we've already done here. It's definitely worth doin' because when you have a smaller scale project, having the smaller scale door is gonna look more in tune with the design of the rest of the project. So we've got these smaller scale bits sourced for ya on the PDF that accompanies the video. Check 'em out and if you need to use 'em, you'll know where to get 'em.