The Great Screen Door Diversion of 2025

 Well it did not take long for me to get knocked off course on the tansu project early in the year. A screen door on our front porch has been something that we have wanted almost since when we first moved in over 30 years ago. The complication is that the door has a round top, so it will take a bit more effort. Still, that is no excuse for a 30 year delay!

Anyways it turned out that spring 2025 was the time. I figured I could have it done by summer and get back to the tansu. Nope. End of summer? Nope. End of fall? Nope? End of the year? Almost!

So while I was diverted off the tansu onto the screen door, I got further diverted to other projects. The back door needed refinishing. I wanted to make some stands for a few bonsai I have. The shop air filter packed it in and had to be repaired. I bought a fixture plate for the horizontal mortiser to assist with work holding. I bought an X-Y table for my drill press to also assist with work holding. And so on. 

 I acquired some sapele and got to work. The first task was to match the curved top of the existing door frame. I made a cardboard template, then bandsawed out four pieces to make the curve, then cleaned them up with a spokeshave. 

 

 Next was to connect them all with floating mortise and tenon joints. This is where I had the fixture plate diversion on the horizontal mortiser. It worked well for the repeatability of multiple mortises, as well as holding everything securely. 

 

 

 Two of the curved pieces I had somehow cut too short so had to remake them. 'Measure once and cut twice', that seems to be my motto sometimes. Once I redid them, I did a test fit with a couple stiles. Everything fit pretty well and a minimal amount of tweaking was required.

 It was right around this point that my shop dust filter died. I initially assumed it was the capacitor, so I bought a new one and and installed it, but no joy. I wound up having to tear the whole **** thing apart. I eventually figured out that the circuit board had packed it in. Unobtanium. So I just bypassed it with a three position switch to give me the speed control. I lost the fancy pushbutton membrane keyboard and the shut off delay timer, but who cares? Not me apparently.

 

 

Next was to glue up the curved top. It was a bit more difficult than I anticipated and a couple of the joints are not as tight as they should be. Although the floating tenons were easy to do on the curved pieces, in retrospect I should have used an overlapping joint for better strength. 

 

Next I fitted the rails and stiles. Naturally I had underestimated the amount of sapele I would need so had to go get more, but could not get any that matched well. So the rails are different grain and different colour than the stiles. At this point I was just about ready to paint the **** thing instead!

 

 

Then the back door refinishing diversion popped up. I had refinished it a few years ago, but it faces south and is not well protected from the rain. So it definitely needed redoing. Which took a ton of work to sand off the old finish without sanding through the veneer, then applying bleach to the dark areas, then staining, then a couple coats of clear on top. It took weeks and was kind of a ho-hum job, but at least it is done and I can ignore it for a couple more years! 

 

So it was back to the screen door. With the frame itself completed, although not glued up, I needed a way to attach the screen. After all, it is to be a screen door! I decided to route a 1/8" deep groove all around the inside edge of the door, and use staples to affix the screen into the groove, then cover up the groove with strips of sapele. 

Naturally this pretty much tripled the amount of work in the project, but I blithely carried on as the summer and fall ticked away.  Despite the fact that I despise using the router, it was the right tool for this job and it worked well. 

 Here is a shot before the final glue up of all the parts. The top curve is already glued, but the floating tenons to connect it to the stiles are visible, as well as all of the thin strips of wood to cover up the staples. You can also see that I applied some stain to the rails in a rather unsuccessful attempt to get them to better match the stiles. A cardboard template is also visible, along with some laundry!

 

One last test fit before installing the screen and the hinges. Fits well into the opening, but I needed a bit more space for the hinges so further tweaking was in order. 

 

And here it is in the garage with the hinges and screen installed. I used some nice copper nails to attach the staple cover strips, this is a 'back' view.

 

I have a piston damper that I will attach to it when I install the door in the frame, this will prevent it slamming shut. I also need a couple handles, one for each side, as well as a latch of some sort. Now that everything is complete, I am thinking I'll wait for the spring before I install it. Basically a year late! Back to the tansu future now!

 

Douglas Fir Burl Tansu Cabinet (I)

Several years ago I spotted a cabinet by Seth Janofsky. He incorporated some unusual pine panels with tiny pitch pockets in the grain. The frame is cherry and the interior is I believe red oak.

I really admired the clean lines of the piece, and the use of the unusual pine was charming but not overblown. It was discrete even though it was right in your face! 

As a bonus, it was designed for the front and sides to be removable and then it becomes a display cabinet. Realistically probably would not see much use in this manner, but a nice touch.

 

 So I decided to make a cabinet based on this, as I had some Doug fir with a rare burl pattern in it.

The Doug fir had a good backstory, as it was given to me years ago by my dad's cousin who has now passed.  He told me that his dad was burning a bunch of scrap wood 50+ years ago and had tossed this piece into the fire, so he rescued it. Many years later as he was getting older and knew that I was interested in woodworking he gave it to me. It still had scorch marks on it when I received it from him!

 

Doug Fir slab with grain detail after run thru planer

For the interior I had the last of the straight grained Port Orford cedar that I had chainsaw milled myself into slabs probably ten or fifteen years ago. And for the frame I had some Kwila, a very hard and heavy tropical wood, that I had purchased several sticks of many years ago in a lumberyard in Chilliwack. Kwila was apparently a favourite wood of James Krenov's, and it goes by many different names, none of which I have heard of either!

 

The panels were going to be veneered, with the fir on the outside and the cedar on the inside. So the first order of business was to cut the veneers on my bandsaw. I was careful to make sure that the face of the veneer which was going to be visible was jointed and handplaned smooth before I cut each piece off.

 

PO cedar veneers stacked

 Once that was done I glued up the panels with a layer of thin commercial veneer in the middle, using a vacuum bag veneer press I purchased. No good pictures of that process, but here is the end result: Two foot long panels with the Doug fir on one side and the PO cedar on the other. 

 

I'm not sure what the dimensions are of Janofsky's cabinet, but in my case the size of the Doug fir slab limited the veneers to about two feet long, so I decided to make the overall cabinet about three feet tall and the main pieces of the carcass 1 1/4" wide. So I proceeded to resaw the kwila accordingly. I was very careful to make sure that all surfaces were square and flat.

The kwila is so hard to handplane, even though my plane blade is made of hard steel, it requires frequent resharpening. I also picked up a splinter of it in my thumb several months ago which I cannot seem to get rid of. 

So that is where I am at now. Next I am planning to mock up the frames for a couple of panels. Once that is done I can nail down the exact dimensions and start cutting the Kwila up to length. I calculated there will be 54 separate pieces so I have some work ahead of me!