Popular Woodworking 2006-04 № 154, страница 53

Door Joinery

Cope and Stick

The preferred joint for doors, the cope and stick provides a strong interlocking joint with matched profiles and leaves a groove to fit the door panel.

Mortise and Tenon

This joint offers great strength, but with a simpler appearance. It can be used at corners or in joining intermediary rails to stiles in multi-panel door frames.

Corner Bridle

Providing lots of gluing surface, the bridle joint leaves visible joinery and can be created on a band saw or table saw.

Half Lap

A quick door frame joint, the half lap offers only acceptable strength and requires careful setup to leave a flush surface on the door frame face.

Dowels

Dowels create a good looking door frame but only offer minimal strength. They also require a good jig and smidgen of luck to do them well.

Popular Woodworking

■ Raised-panel Doors

When most people think of cabinet doors, a raised-panel door appears in their mind. As with a dovetailed drawer, the raised-panel door means quality and style. And, as with a dovetailed drawer, they take more work to create.

Panel doors in general are made of vertical (stiles) and horizontal (rails) components joined at the corners using a variety of methods. The long edges of the rails and stiles can be left plain or decorative edge treatments can be added with a shaper or router. The center of the door (panel) can be raised (which really means the edges of the panel are lowered, leaving the look of a panel that is rising to the level of the frame) or left flat and recessed below the plane of the door's face components.

For a decorative panel door a cope-and-stick joint is most often used. This is created using a router or shaper cutter to create mating joinery on the rails and stiles (see the illustration at right). The bits take much of the difficulty out of this

process, but they must be accurately set up to achieve a tight, attractive joint.

The panel that is fit into the grooves created in the door frame also requires some special care to create. Because of the wood movement that occurs in solid panels due to changes in humidity, the panel must be fit into the door to allow room for expansion, but also leave a fit that is snug enough to keep the panel from rattling in the door frame when opened or closed.

If this sounds like a lot of work but you still want a frame-and-panel door, consider a flat-panel door. This design occurs often in Shaker, Arts & Crafts and what many call "country" furniture pieces. The rails and stiles are free of decoration and the panel is most often a ^"-thick piece of veneered plywood glued into a stopped or through groove in the frame.

A variety of joinery methods are available for the more simple frame-and-panel doors, including mortise and tenon, bridle and even dowels (see list at left for some of these options). Most are

A classic raised-panel door is shown here. The rails (the horizontal frame pieces) and stiles (the vertical frame pieces) are joined using cope-and-stick joinery, with the decorative profile at the interior corners appearing mitered and perfectly matched. The panel itself is raised (cut on a bevel) from the full thickness to a thinner width at the edge to allow it to fit in grooves cut in the rails and stiles.