Making Doors With Hand Tool Methods

Last year we made a series on making a wall-hung tool cabinet using hand tools and the whole process involved many elements to help woodworkers develop various woodworking and cabinet making skills. As we were filming we generated some extra footage intended for different YouTube presentations and one of the different series was how to make a door by hand. The door is panelled, grooved and has mortise and tenon construction methods for the joinery. The goal is to make a twist-free door starting with the rails and stiles and using my method for guaranteed co-planer surfaces between rails and stiles. This in essence means that within the mortises the inside faces or cheeks of the mortise holes must be as near parallel to the outside faces as is humanly possible. A difficult accomplishment even for skilled craftsmen. Forming the tenon cheeks with faces where the cheeks perfectly align with the outside faces of the rails requires the same level of accuracy too. All of this leads to the outside faces of the rails and stiles being perfectly surface aligned. I have never seen anyone create a strategy like this that didn’t follow what I developed and show in this video, but I have consistently seen twisted doors made by those using both hand and machine methods. This series has been important to me in that I wanted to pass on what truly works for the generations to come who love hand work as I do. It’s a four-part series and I think/hope that you will enjoy what we have put together for woodworkers around the world. As apprenticeships and craft training through colleges and universities gradually shut down over the years to come we must find alternative ways to ensure the future of craftsmanship. Please, if you do like it, make sure that you tell others about this and our other craft training series as this is the only way we can truly protect the traditions of handwork. Much of what we teach comes from decades of training passed down that will only come this way.

Here is the link to a guaranteed future for craftsmanship internationally.