30 how door parts fit together

What I'd like to show you now is the safest procedure for putting together frame and panel assemblies

There's a little more here than meets the eye, and I'd like to help you avoid some trouble

Rule number one is that you never glue up a panel assembly like you see here

without first a successful dry fitting. The parts have to come together fully

before you can trust the process to actually use some glue on

Because once you get the glue in place and you start getting these parts coming together

if they're not fitting tightly, they're probably not going to come apart to give you another chance

besides being really messy. So, before I run through a dry fit with this particular mock-up panel

I just want to point out again how important it is that no glue get on the panels

Now, you can see here, this is my hand-planed panel, so the bevel is continuous

It doesn't flatten out. It's a continuous angle, which means that the panel

does not match exactly with the groove. This is the traditional way of raising panels, and it works fine

You just have to plane to the point where the outer edge of the groove

is the same thickness as the panel, as you see it here

This is a great setup. I've got some stain wiped on here

If I plan to stain a door like this, I want the stain to extend within the groove

so that no unstained wood is revealed if the panel shrinks. And when it comes time to actually applying glue, you have to be very careful

Certainly, you want glue here, and on the end, and here, but you don't want to extend that glue so far that you have a significant amount of squeeze-out and oozing

that might lock the panel in place. These joints are quite strong, even if you only extend the glue maybe three-quarters of the way along the tenon

So, dry fitting is pretty simple, and it should be done with every assembly you do

Now, when it comes to clamping assemblies like this together, you must only apply clamping pressure across the rails

So, we've got a clamp here and a clamp here. If this was a longer door with an intermediate rail in the middle, I'd have a clamp there too

But you never clamp in the middle. First of all, the structure has no way of resisting that inward pressure

so it's going to bow the stiles in. And second of all, there's no point in clamping there

because there's no glue and there's nothing to force together. So, when you draw the parts together

and everything looks good, you get a tight joint over here, then you're ready to take it apart again, apply glue, and bring it all together

Now, in practice, you might find that there could be a little bit of mismatch here

between the edge of the rail and the ends of the stiles

But that's no matter, because assemblies like this, doors like this, have been made, you should have made it so it's a little bit larger

and you'll be planing that so that it fits the door opening perfectly