Still Shuttering

It's still sunny, and I'm still doing the shutters.

This pair shows the before and after stages, but it doesn't do full justice to how well the wood comes up with sanding and varnishing:



The one on the right is the one seen in the previous post, and its finished surface would be suitable for a table-top, smooth and with a very interesting colour to the grain, given by 80 years of weathering. What has been taking a lot of time has been the state of the mortises. They are broad and cut all the way through the bottom or top of the side uprights. But in a number of places the wood beyond the mortise has split right through, allowing the joint to open up like a crocodile's jaws. So in these cases I've dismantled the framing entirely, cleaned out the inside of the mortise and the tenon edges, and put it back together with glue. I've held the joint together with as many clamps as I could find, while replacing and gluing-in the wooden pegs. This has reconstituted the mortises quite well - we'll see how long they last. Where wood is missing entirely I've replaced it with a resin-based filler.

For the average shutter I've needed all the clamps I have, so I can only glue one at a time. And the glue needs 24 hours to set.

When it comes to the final coats of weatherproofing "varnish", I can do two shutters at the same time, and I even have a way of doing both sides without waiting for the first to dry:



There's one last pair of shutters to go. I will then be able to stop inhaling powdered oak for a while: it really is a very dusty job, though I have been able to do a lot of it outside, giving me slightly cleaner air some of the time.

Shutters

As the weather is now beginning to feel autumnal, and rain might actually be a possibility soon - it's been a very dry summer - I've started to renovate the shutters on the farmhouse. The shutters are oak, and when new back in the 1920s must have looked pretty good. Now they are in very poor condition.



The picture above shows one of the corners, which are of course the most damaged areas, and the picture below shows one that I have dismantled:



The bolts on the hinges had to be ground off with the angle-grinder before I could take the framework off.

Here's a shutter in the course of being glued back together, though the original construction doesn't seem to have used any glue, just wooden pegs through the six mortice & tenon joints. The holes for the pegs can be seen in the picture above: the pegs knock out surprisingly easily with a drift. Quite a few were missing already.



The shutters below - a pair I did last week - could be dismantled without taking the hinges off, as the joints were open at the ends: the cross pieces could simply be slid out, either up or down, and reassembled with the four vertical planks of the shutter still together.



These have come up quite nicely, and should be good for a few more years - the weatherproof treatment will help, anyway. I am not so sure about the pair I am currently working on, as the wood is in worse condition. I will need to use some filler on a couple of the corners, but the resin-based stuff works very well, even though it shows afterwards: it doesn't take a stain.

The hardware shop didn't have any black japanned bolts for the hinges, so I am painting the mushroom heads, which will sit directly onto the wood, before fitting the bolts in place. That way I should be able to avoid getting paint onto the wood:



and I've put a coat of paint on the hinges too. I'll paint the other end of the bolt, the end with the nut that will be tightened up onto the hinge, when I've cut it to length and the shutters are finally back together.

Before starting today's shutters, I finished wiring up the lights in the workshop, so I should now be able to work there at all hours of the day. It's been quite cloudy today so without the lights it would have been too dark inside to see what i was doing.