One Small Project: Cabinet Doors

ILENE has almost 20 beautiful cherry wood cabinet doors, each consisting of four side pieces to make a frame and one central rectangle that the other four enclose.  Putting a finger into the hole at the left side of the photo you will feel a brass latch. By pulling it, the door opens from the right on its brass hinges visible here on the left.

This particular door (image by {and of} J. Rice, thank you; and feline enhanced, thank you Alphie Girl) is behind a small vanity, a/k/a cat seat, and with its mirror it has given us no problems. But all the others doors have a rectangular piece of cherry wood  where the mirror is, which is thick except at its four edges, where it fits into the thin grooves in the four framing pieces.

However, the other doors, with wooden centers, have suffered from a minor defect: the central wood panel was made a bit too large. It's fine, except in the hot humid summers. Then center pieces expanded, pushing apart the vertical sides of the frame. As a result the door became larger than designed and hard to force closed.

What to do? My friend KC, who has sailed with me for at least twelve years years, thought about the issue for months. My thought had been to place a piece of scrap wood against the inside of the frame and tap it with a hammer to force it apart. Once apart we clean out the old glue, sand down the central piece which was too large, and glue and clamp the pieces back together again. KC said: hold on a minute; if you don't tap it hard enough, nothing will happen, but if you tap it just a little bit too hard, you will end of with a mess of cracked wood and the need to build an expensive new door.

After the months of noodling KC invented and built a door pulling tool that has been used, during two winters to fix most of ILENE's doors. It has also been used to fix the doors of Bob and Brenda's "Pandora" during a different winter. But the last two of ILENE's doors "expanded" during the last couple of years in the Caribbean and they needed to be fixed as well.

Here is the inside of KC's tool: In the center of the photo you can see the end of an "L" shaped aluminum extrusion sticking down from the top 4 x 4, and a flat piece of aluminum screwed onto the bottom. Both of these extrusions fit up against the inside of the piece of frame to be pushed out. The top extrusion fits into and against  the wide space in the front of the door and the horizontal one fits against the narrow piece of the same piece of frame at the back of the door.  Thus the two aluminum pieces are snugged against the inside of the vertical piece of framing, from the front and the back, preventing it from moving to the right in the picture above.

Here is the rest of the tool. The other two 4 x 4s are clamped tightly to the top and bottom horizontal pieces of the frame with the rubber matting pieces (shown siting at the bottom) to grip the wood and prevent marring. Each pair of 4 x 4s is clamped tightly to the door. 

And then the fun begins. By tightening the nuts next to the inside right right side, one turn at a time, the distance between the pairs of 4 x 4s is extended, very, very slowly. The left side can't move to the right, and the right is slowly pulled to the right. One half turn on each of the four nuts, and then again and again until eventually you hear a popping sound, the glue has given way and and the frame has come neatly apart.

So: one trip up to New Rochelle to get the doors from the boat and another to put them back on. These were sandwiched around the fun day in the power tool laden basement of KC's lovely home out in Somerset County NJ. There KC's lovely wife, Helen, fed me on KC's famous 99 percent crab meat crab cakes. A great day and the doors are now back in place aboard ILENE.  Ah the pleasure of generous friends with skills and tools!