craftsman style Entry door with cutom stained glass leaded light

African mahogany entry door.

This was a great learning experience. I learned you can’t just build an all wood door, you mush first “build” the lumber used to construct it, nearly half of the time required to build a solid wood door, that wont warp, is spent preparing the wood. Once done with this step the average person would not be able to tell that you had done anything towards building the door.
When building the panels you must have separate interior and exterior panels so that the outside and inside environments aren’t both working on the same piece of wood. I resawed a 6/4” board in half, then planed them down to about 1/2”, I then glued the inside and out side panels to a 1/2 MDF core in a vacuum bag, (this was a tip given to me by master craftsman and fellow LJ Les Hastings) the MDF functions as a stable core and insulation for the panels.

I used a stave core design, the idea here is to glue strips or staves together with alternating grain patters so that when one stave wants to move a sertain way there are several others fighting it, keeping the over all rail or stile from warping. First off you cut the 8/4 stock down into approx 1 1/2” square staves. Then mix them up and flip some end-for-end then gluing them back together. Once dry, jointed and planed, you glue a 1/4×5 1/2” veneer, that is cut from another solid board, to both sides of each stave block , this is so that once glued the board will look like solid lumber again. The 6th picture above is end cuts of a stile and panel, you can see the staves and outer veneers, the black is end grain paint.

2” mortise and tennons along with 1/2×3” dowels (2 per side for top and middle rail and 4 on the bottom) were used to construct the door, there is also 4 bolted steel thread rods (2 in bottom rail and one rod in each of the other two rails) running the width of the door. These were covered with custom cut plugs.

I used a marine epoxy (recommended by Les Hastings) for most of the construction, but ran out so I finished with some titebond 3. The finish is 3 coats of a wiping varnish using 1/3 spar polly, 1/3 tung oil, 1/3 B. linseed oil. Then 3 or 4 more coats of straight spar varnish.

Leaded light

This was my first leaded glass project but I have a good friend who is a retired leaded light maker. He loaned me the tools needed and gave me several pointers and a couple books. I’m very pleased with how it turned out.

The door has been hanging for approx 5 months now, through very high temps and humidity outside and cool, low humidly inside, with no noticeable movement.

dayton

www.daytonwooddesign.com