Finish Carpentry Skills A Bit Rusty

I'm still working on this custom door. The door is residing in our kitchen on top of the jig which is on top of two sawhorses. The weather has been lousy so I am stuck working indoors this week. Throw in Adam's wisdom teeth problems and my off-and-on lousy health, and things are moving a bit slowly...

Since my last blog entry about making some progress in assembling the door for our new half bathroom, I've managed to drill out the holes for the pegs which are intended to hold each joint together. Unfortunately, like so many other things on this half bathroom project, this didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked.

Worse yet, I need to make three more of these doors so I need to figure out how to avoid repeating these mistakes. I figured that writing about the problems might help in avoiding these same mistakes on the next three doors. 

Pegs are inserted through this joint to hold the pieces together.

First let me explain how I intended to fasten each of the joints on this door. Each piece of the door was shaped to fit together in a tongue and groove type of joint. I can't remember the official name of this type of joint but it is sort of like a full-length mortise and tenon joint. One piece has a long groove... and the adjoining piece has a thick tongue which fits perfectly into the opposing groove. 

I added some wood glue to the groove, assembled the door and then clamped the door to hold those joints together until the glue set up. 

Once the glue set up, I needed to drill holes through the door... two into each of these joints...  through one side of the groove, then through the tongue from the adjoining piece, then through the other side of the groove. Then a peg would be inserted into the hole holding these joints together.

Tear-outs after a putty of sawdust and glue is applied and sanded.
It makes me sick to my stomach just seeing a photo of this mistake...

These 3/8" holes needed to be drilled through the entire door using a forstner bit... two at each joint... for a total of twenty holes... and filled with twenty 3/8" pegs. I knew that I had to be careful about drilling all the way through the door because the wood tends to tear out around the hole on the back side. One way to avoid this problem is to firmly hold the door down on top of another piece of wood and just drill through the door and into the sacrificial piece of wood underneath... I did that... I drilled the first two holes... then turned the door over to see how clean the holes turned out... Both holes tore out terribly on the back side of the door!

After all that work building this custom door and all the energy I spent in doing so, I have to say that this almost triggered a heart attack. Then I wanted to cry when I started to think about how much energy it would require to fix or rebuild the door. Then I was angry with myself. In the end, I've accepted that I am terribly out of practice when it comes to precision finish carpentry work. And, to be honest, this type of carpentry is really in the 'master carpenter' category. So... I shouldn't be so hard on myself, right?  Haha... nice thought but that isn't me!

Ahhh... nice, clean joint with beautiful pegs inserted...
this is the way each joint should look!

I'm a perfectionist. I have a very acute attention to detail. And, for some reason, I expect skills I honed decades ago to still be honed today, with no practice, at a professional level! I admit that this expectation truly is a bit ridiculous but I can't help but feel I made some stupid, elementary mistakes here.

I then changed my strategy. Ideally, I would have preferred to use my drill press. I simply do not have the facility to do this with a jig/table/working surface as large as I would need. My next option was to drill a pilot hole through the door in each location of the pegs and then start drilling with the 3/8" bit... first on the top side... then from the opposite side. This definitely eliminated the tear-outs but now I had a problem trying to drill straight enough to meet cleanly in the middle.

In the end, this door will probably be just fine but it is requiring a lot of 'repairs' already!

I had to fix those tear-outs on the first two holes. Those two tear-outs were perhaps the worst I have ever seen. It was probably because the wood is so soft (pine). I mixed some of the sawdust I created from this wood with some wood glue... mixed it into a paste... applied it to the tear-outs... sanded... repeated... I still need one more finely mixed version to fill some fine crevices but it is looking "acceptable" to me now.  

Now our living room and kitchen area is covered in a fine saw dust. Great... more work to clean up the mess. I'm looking forward to being able to spread out in the yard where I can set up and use a whole bunch of tools. 

Little by little I am making progress. These rusty carpentry finish carpentry skills are getting the best of me in the process though...