Miscellaneous Repairs & Modifications

Northwest Heights, above and north of Forest Heights, just off of Skyline Boulevard.

This was a first for us. Never had we seen a stile & rail door seemingly falling apart under its own weight. The “lock-rail” and the “bottom-rail” on this 40″ X 97″ X 2 1/4″ hardwood round-top door had somehow sheared off their respective anchors (mortise & tendon?) at the hinge-stile and were succumbing to gravities pull.

This of course, was translating into the bottom-rail grinding down on top of the wood sill. If you enlarge the photo by clicking on it, you can see the rub-marks in the top photo. Imagine how heavy a door this size of door is, and you might be able to imagine how difficult it was to open & close this door before we fixed it.

Here’s a close-up shot of the lock-rail where it intersects with the hinge-stile.

This even closer “close-up” shows the “wood-stain-footprint” of where the lock-rail used to sit relative to the hinge-stile and reveals how far the rail has slid down.

7/16″ of an inch to be exact! So we temporarily boarded-up the opening & retrieved the door back to our shop.

Resourceful folks that we are, we employed the use of the overhead door opening in our masonry building to sandwich the door so as to JACK the DOOR-RAILS & PANELS back to their original position relative to the hinge-stile.

Steve Hilt is laughing in this re-installation photo (above) because we had asked for some “action-shots” showing our technicians engaged in the work. And of course the notion that one person might be able to lift this door into position really is quite funny because of how heavy this door is. Since Brandon was taking the photo, Steve was left to pose for the photo by himself.

In these two photos above, we are showing the dowelling-plugs that indicate where we drilled through the hinge-stile and re-secured the RAILS using some heavy-duty steel lag-bolts.

I believe we referred our client to Dan Rice (http://woodwindowstaining.com/) for touching up the wood door to remove some of the stains due to weather, and to blend-in our dowel-plugs and sanding marks. No more rubbing on the threshold.