A careless gust of wind slammed our neighbours' - Tony and Anne's - living room door, and one of the panels broke out when the door hit the frame. The panels are rebated into the framework of the door - Wikipedia gives a useful guide to how a paneled door is put together - and although the panel can be taken out when it's broken, after it has been repaired the door has to be dismantled to put it back in.
The door has vertical styles, and horizontal rails. Wikipedia reveals the interesting fact that a rail placed in the middle of a door - and Tony's door has two of these - is correctly called a muntin. So we have here a double-muntin door. Or perhaps a thirteen-piece door.
To put the panel back in, one of the styles - the one at the edge without the hinges - has to be taken off, so the panel can be slid back in between the top rail and the upper muntin (I'm getting the hang of this technical stuff). Here's how it was done.
The broken panel is just a little worm-eaten:
But in the hope that the wood-worm have now finished their meal, I've glued the broken edge back on:
I've clamped the parts using the bench vice to pull the edge tight. Although I've been able to clean the surplus glue off the upper side, I can't get at the lower side to clean that. We'll just have to hope that not too much glue has squeezed out.
The lock mechanism has to come off, and maybe when it goes back I can find something better than a long nail to hold the nice china doorhandle on.
Some of the screws were a little difficult to remove. I can't at all work out why the countersunk ones got to be so rusty, but not the other longer ones.
The door is held together with wooden pegs, and I hoped that it wasn't also glued. This picture of the bottom edge of the door shows that it must have been a stock size door cut down to fit the rather low opening, rather than a door made to measure:
The wooden pegs are the dark wood squares (probably oak, which colours more with varnish - the rest of the door is pine). The one on the left has been cut in half, after being fitted, when the door was sawn down to fit the opening. I think it's remarkable that the half-peg is still in place: I was able to take it out with my fingernails. There was very little keeping it in.
That picture also shows that the paint was taken off the door with a disk sander, and the edge of the disk has cut into the wood at a couple of places in the corners of the panels.
I started to knock the pegs out from the other side (they are tapered), with a hammer and a metal drift - of course, a wooden one might have been better. And here the pegs have just started to come clear of the surface:
Every one came out cleanly and without deforming. If possible, I'll re-use them when the door goes back together:
After that, and keeping my fingers crossed for a non-glued construction, I tapped the style off the four rails. It moved relatively easily, but I took it just a bit at a time:
Finally it came off entirely, and quite cleanly:
You can see that at the end nearest the camera, the tenon has broken off the end of the lower rail. It looks as if the original joiner was a bit careless cutting the shoulders of the tenon, and had sawed just a millimeter or so too far into the tenon. You could see it at the other end, too, though that tenon survived being knocked apart. In any event, I glued the tenon back into the end of the bottom rail. It won't be really as strong as the others, but I'll glue these joints when I re-assemble the door, and perhaps that will help. Here's the tenon being glued:
This joint must always have been a little weak, as one edge of the mortice had been removed when the door was cut to size (making it technically a corner bridle joint I think).
When the glue is dry tomorrow I'll have a go at putting it all back together. It's a cold day today so I have left the fan-heater going in the workshop: glue likes a temperature above 5deg or so to set properly.
Most of the pictures of the stairs are on the Facebook public site for Leynhac le Fort, but I have now got to the point where the stairs can actually be used, even if they aren't the way they will be when the Fort is inhabited:
The handrail for the upper part can't go in until I fit the newel post for the upper floors, and the underside of those stairs will eventually be covered with a suitable timber cladding. I can't do it just yet as I hope to let the stairs settle and "work" first, and then drive the wedges in finally to take care of any shrinking.
The first flight of stairs is now beginning to go up. The bottom step has a bullnose: the idea of this is to set back one of the newel posts to make the entry to the stairs a little wider. It's traditional to make the end of the stair that sticks out a rounded shape, because using a rectangular end looks a little crude (I drew it out that way first and it didn't look quite right).
It can be seen here in the middle of the bottom of the picture:
This type of step presents a number of challenges, mostly of the "you'd better measure it all very carefully before cutting" kind. It's rebated differently at either end, and it can only be put in place with difficulty once the newel post on the right is fixed in place. But it has to be done in that order (newel post first, then step) as the newel post needs a bit of manipulation to get it in place once the stringer is attached to it. I have cut a semicircular "cheese" of wood to go under the rounded end to provide it with some extra support - a corbel attached to the riser below the stair.
Here is the right hand end of the step.
The joint fits very nicely, but I didn't quite get the cuts in the newel post right first time - but luckily they were too short rather than too long. The idea is to make it look as if the whole of the back edge of the step passes straight through the post: in fact there's only a centimetre groove cut out of the post: the remainder is cut from the step.
Underneath this part of the step is some hidden superstructure that will eventually give support to the newel post. The post will be braced by the step itself, by the riser above the step which will be mortised lengthwise vertically into the post, and by the (heavy) stringer which will be mortised into the back of the post. All of these mortises are yet to be done.
Here's the other end of the step. Again it's a nice tight joint.
One problem I get is that the parts have to be disassembled more than once, and doing this tends to splinter the top of the rebate when the step is pulled out. I don't have a solution for this.
Finally, the current work in progress.
I am cutting the top of the next post back into the beam above it. It's very old wood but once through the surface worm-eaten half-centimetre, it is good to work, though hard. I have something of a problem in prospect of fitting the post in place once it has the stringer attached, but I think the way to do it is to usnscrew the plinth it sits on and slide the plinth into place once the post is seated on it. I'm shaping the cut in the beam on top with a slant so it can go in at an angle but appear to be squarely cut once in place. We'll see if this works.
The first flight for the Fort - technically, I suppose, it's the second one, but the first flight isn't yet assembled - is now in place and screwed up. And screwed down. And wedged. And pinned .....
Everything is level and the mortices are nice and tight. They are draw-bored, so that hammering the pins in pulls them a little bit closer together. The hole in the tenon is set slightly closer to the newel post than the holes in the morticed newel post. The pins have to be hit very hard to get them to go in the way they should, and I broke a couple before perfecting the technique. A lttle bit of glue helps to act as a lubricant.
The wooden pins in the mortices have been cut off flush. It was a revelation to find that there's a special flexible saw for doing this, with teeth that are set only to one side so it doesn't scratch the surface of the wood.
The underside will eventually be planked over, so almost nothing here will show:
The last picture shows how the wedges go - and they go in after being walloped very hard indeed: it's all oak so nothing splits ....
I think the vertical wedges for the risers need to be pinned in place, or else they could work loose. The horizontal ones are partly held there by the risers, but I'll pin those too. I plan to leave the stairs open like this until the end of the summer, when I'll give the wedges another good whack with the club hammer. There will probably be a bit of shrinkage and that should take it up. Anything after that will just have to be a normal consequence of timber construction.
One of the things I've learned about using glue is that you don't want it show when you've finished. It seals the surface of the wood, so that any subsequent treatment - stain or varnish - won't take properly in the area that has glue on it.
So you have to make sure that the glue goes into the hollowed-out portion of the joint, not on the part that will be going into it. If you glue a peg, as you knock it in, the glue stays on the edge of the hole.
So here I am trying to get the glue carefully into the 12mm hole, without touching the edges:
I found out later it's easier to do it with a flat chip of wood narrowed down with a chisel, rather than with a round peg (as shown here). Once the glue is in the hole, all that's needed is to give the peg a really good thump with the mallet:
.
Nevertheless, I broke two pegs, and had to knock them out again from the other side.
Actually just a little too snug. As the mortise is so nicely cut, I'll trim a bit off the tenons with a shoulder plane. If I can find it ....
This is the first joint for the stairs. I cut the tenon with the router and a jig from either side, and the mortise with the router. It's 35mm deep, which is just about the limit of the router cutter.
The jig I cut to give me the correct angle for cutting the ends isn't right for cutting at any other angle, so when it came to taking a bit of surplus height off the stringer I had to go back to a handsaw.
I'd had some trouble getting the saw to start in the right place, but I remembered an old hint: cut a starter groove with a wide chisel first (which ensures a straight line, hopefully one that you get in the right place) and then put the saw in that. I was quite pleased with the fine cut - I wanted a small amount of the stringer to project above the level of the very top step.
Eventually, when there are some steps, no doubt it will. For the moment I have to content myself with seeing it in position. This is only a temporary fix, as the plasterboard needs to go up first.
It arrives on the level I had marked for the floor of the landing about two centimetres too low. I think this is because the lower floor has a slope down from the right to the left. I had taken the proposed height of the landing from the floor level: measured down from the floor above it's exactly right. I'm pretty sure the stringers down to the ground level won't need to be adapted. But we'll see.
The stairs go through between the ground and first floor, where - against the wall - there's an old beam - probably one of the fort's original ones, so maybe 700 years old. It has an outer layer, maybe a centimetre thick, heavily attacked by woodworm and quite friable, but below that the wood is like a newly cut beam, except that the colour is a little darker.
I've been cutting a diagonal rebate into the beam to let the stringer sit tightly against the wall. The beam overhangs the finished wall surface by five or six centimetres, and like almost everything else it's neither square nor vertical.
I've attacked with a saw, a hammer and chisel, with two different hand planes and with an electric plane. That final surface is the hand plane and chisel, and it's as close to square and vertical as I've been able to make it. Working at this angle results in all the woodchips going down your (left) sleeve.
I'm fitting it to a plywood template that I hope is an accurate copy of the stringer I've made. I wanted to be sure that I didn't cut away too much, and that I got the angle of the cuts right.
The next job is to cut the two ends of the stringer to fit between the cross-beam here and the newel post at the bottom. I'm not confident of getting a clean cut with a saw, so I'll try using a jig and the router to get a good edge. Of course, the jig needs to be a nice straight line, and that took some work.
Using this should also let me do the tenons that are needed at the newel post ends of the stringer. It should work better for that than for a complete cut - for the latter, once the router has taken me down the first few centimetres, I'll probably have to do the rest with a saw.
I'm working on what will be the fourth stringer, the last of the ones for the downstairs part of the staircase.
The planks I've bought have been rough-sawn on a big band saw, and after that they have warped a little, leaving one side dished and the other..... er ... convex. The big band saw obviously has a couple of misaligned teeth, so the result is that there's a series of gashes across the wood at regular intervals. I have to plane both sides far enough to be able to take out these saw-cuts.
It's ironic that it's only the very big bits of wood that I have to work by hand, with old-fashioned planes. The thinner ones will go through the planer on the machine. These have both their weight against them, and their width - the planer would in theory manage up to 20cm, and these are 25cm. But I don't think I'd want to risk them in the machine anyway.
The wood has also been of distinctly variable quality - the third stringer was very difficult, cross-grained on all four edges, so that it had to be planed in different directions. This one, however, was an ideal piece: all the grain in the same direction, no knots to speak of: just those band saw cuts to be removed. It started like this - I've put in a couple of strokes of the plane to show the wood surface:
After about twenty minutes with the small coffin plane, it looked like this:
I couldn't quite bring myself to finish the concave side before starting the convex one, so I was turning it over from time to time:
Later on, I'd got it looking pretty clean, except at the edges:
And by the time I was properly satisfied, I think I must have taken about a millimetre off both sides. And that took most of the afternoon. But it won't be long now before I start putting up the newel posts and trying to fit the stringers into them. That would be a milestone.
In Aurillac there's a timber merchant with a fine supply of oak, and I've been buying some big planks, in thicknesses up to 54mm (2 1/8th inches). The thick ones will be the stringers for the staircase: the sides of the stairs which the treads and risers slot into.
The first job is to cut them up to an approximate size. As they're pretty heavy, it needs two people to do this, so here is Alan - dressed appropriately for November - giving me a hand.
As neither edge starts very straight, it's usually an iterative process: a bit off one side to give a straighter edge, then a bit off the other. This does make some waste, but perhaps the thin strips will do for the wedges needed under each step.
Some of the big planks had warped a little, so I had to plane each side to get a reasonably flat surface. As the stringers will be just under 25cm wide, they won't fit through the planer/thicknesser. And even if they did, they'd be a bit to heavy for it to do a good job. So it was planing by hand. I was surprised to find that the best plane for the initial cut was the old wooden "coffin" plane, but I am learning a lot.
After that I cut a jig for the router-work on the sides, and spent an unreasonable amount of time making sure I'd laid out the steps properly. The jig has a batten underneath to keep it at the same angle and the same position for each step, and one on top to prevent me cutting down too far - the rebates need to go right to the edge of the stringer, as the stairs will be slotted in from behind.
You can see a partially cut rebate in the picture.
After that was done, it didn't take very long to cut the stair rebates for the whole stringer:
The end nearest the camera was cut with a hand-held circular saw - only just big enough, which is why it shows burn marks rather than a clean cut. I haven't yet plucked up enough courage to cut the tenon on that end: a job for tomorrow.
The router produces a very clean cut:
During the day I also glued up another step (only another 24 to do) and cut a second thick plank for the matching stringer. The second stringer looks like a good piece of oak: quarter sawn so with very little warp in it, and once I started planing it the oak grain - with its characteristic medullary rays - showed very nicely.
Back over at the Fort this afternoon for a couple of further measurements - the depths of the old beams holding up the floor.
I've now drawn the designs at as a large a scale as possible, spotted a couple of problems and re-drawn them, and I'm reasonably sure I know where to start: at the top, and against the wall. Everything is then worked back and away from the stringer it's impossible to put in afterwards.
Oh well, I know what I mean, even if I can't explain it.....
The beams are now all a little cleaner, after being sandblasted, and - from my particular point of view - it should be possible to see the old nails in them before using a chisel.
Removing several centuries' worth of dirt has revealed some very interesting grain - and a lot of very old woodworm - on the things like this doorframe.
And now, or at least very soon, the first bits of the stairs - the low plinth they'll stand on, to spread the weight over the floorboards - will be cut, sanded, routered, shaped, and installed. And then it'll be the first newel post and stringer.
Sometimes I wonder what is holding the Fort together. Probably just gravity .... the gravity of what would happen if anything shifted.
Take this beam:
There's a large cross beam (underneath the camera) and the large beam with the remains of junction box fastened to it is about four or five metres of 250mm by 250mm oak. And it has a convenient notch cut out of it, just where it ought to sit on the cross beam. I think another beam - coming in from the left - with a corresponding notch used to sit underneath it, but at some point in the past it has been moved away. Probably to make the unfeasibly steep staircase a better fit.
The lighter-coloured wood at the end of the notched beam is a bit of scrap wood nailed onto it to support a couple of floorboards above that would otherwise be floating at that point. When we remove the unfeasibly steep staircase we'll put some sensible joists in place there.
I'd been cleaning up along the top of the cross beam when I noticed that here was an accident waiting to happen. Fortunately there is quite a bit of old (and new) oak around on the site, so I cut this one and shaped it roughly to fit:
It needed a bit more planing, as the gap under the beam wasn't quite square - for that matter, the top of the cross beam wasn't particularly level either.
And in it went - with the aid of a mallet - a good snug fit:
Much better now.....
In the meantime, I'm just starting work on the staircase. I've bought a few rough boards of 54mm thick oak: here they are as they arrived, with Mike's dad John about to help unloading. These are heavy, about 30cm wide and 2.6m long.
I wasn't able to get large square section oak for the newel posts, so I have sliced some of the boards up into pieces about 100mm wide, and then glued them together, with the aim of getting a post that's about 100 by 90 mm. It will actually be a bit smaller as it goes through the planer a few times to get nice flat surfaces to glue - and then afterwards, to get nice flat edges. Here's one in process. I'm short of sash clamps, and one end didn't quite close up, so I am regluing just that bit. It's the bit furthest away from the camera in the picture.
The oak looks very nice once it's been planed, so I am hoping for some good results.
