Before I started working on the doors today, I took some time to clean up the shop; it certainly needed it. I’m getting better at cleaning up as I go over the years, but I still end up with stacks of shorts, shavings and sawdust all over, and if I didn’t know it was my own doing I’d swear tools were climbing down from their spot and picking random places in the shop to hang out.
I also spent a bit more time on my gate repair, mostly as a distraction when I felt the need to step away from the very detailed work of fitting doors.
First I tapered the edge of one door that was slightly wider at top than bottom. My bench’s leg vise and sliding deadman (with my Stanley 203 bench clamp) are great for this.
This was the first pair of doors I needed to fit so once again it was time to learn something new. I trimmed the doors enough for them to fit into the opening and figured out how to shim them in place together, which was straightforward. They look pretty good after I trimmed the sides to get the left-to-right spacing close. If you look closely, you may note that the top gap isn’t correct.
A bit of fiddling, up-and-down the stairs between the workshop and study tweaking things, and I had something very close. Then I realized if I swapped the two doors I might be done. And it worked.
