Email This Page to a FriendPreview: Making a Pilot House Door, Part 2 – Finish & Fit

– Okay, so we’ve glued these doors overnight. So it’s been 24 hours. Everything looks, looks good, nice and flat. I’m taking the clamps off of this one. See if I flattened it out. Here we go. Nice. I don’t have a thickness sander in my shop. I use a belt sander to flatten out the whole surface I did have some unevenness after everything had been clamped together. So I had to flatten these out initially, just take off some of the real coarse high spots. The belt sander is very aggressive and it can, actually, do a lot of damage very quickly. So I’m very careful and reserved on when I am doing it and, I’m also, stopping every now and then having a look and just making sure and I’m using a light to, actually, help me look at it. So then I went from the belt sander to a finishing sander to start getting out the scratches I’ve put in with the belt sander as well as getting my smooth surface and then I start using a progression of sand paper as well. So I started with an 80 grit and then I moved to a 180 grit and now I’m going to go and I’m going to put a 220 on here for my final finish. This door has a round porthole in it. So I’m going to cut that opening out. This case, I’m going to use a router and I built this router with a, as an extended base onto it, so I can screw it down in one spot and then I can do a spin around and it’ll give me an exact round opening. If something goes wrong, if it wants to wonder or not stay true, it can do a lot of damage very quickly. So I’m going to be very careful in this process and manage it with making small cuts, a few at a time. Okay, so now I’ve cut out the ring, where the porthole is going to go in the door. You can see. Use the router to create a step for where the glass is going to lay and now I need to cut a ring that’s going to hold the glass in place. So what I’ve done is I’ve already pre-made this to cut out the ring that’s going to fit in that hole. This is a piece of the same mahogany that I’m using. The reason that I did this out of four pieces, instead of a slab of wood, is I get the directional strength of the grain of the wood in this construction. I’ve glued these corners already with epoxy. So here we go to cut out the ring that’s going to fit in that hole. So now I just have to trim off these pieces on the inside. I did a scoring with the router but I didn’t want to cut all the way through it because there is potential for doing a lot of damage there, so I wanted to take it out afterwards. Now I’ve cut out the ring using the router and a couple other tools and I still have to finish it up and clean it all up but there you go. That’ll hold the glass in place. Yeah that’s on and back up and right about there. I guess this will go in like that.

– [Boat Owner] Just look at that gap.

– Nope, nope, you won’t have it.

– [Boat Owner] Oh.

– So I’ll be cleaning these edges up back at the shop.

– And sanding them and yeah. So this will be lifted up a hair, like that.

– Yeah and that, actually, fits perfectly up here.

– Yeah, I’ll sand that smooth.

– Yeah, perfect.

– [Boat Owner] You’ve got a couple more coats of varnish on her, right?

– [Tony] Yeah.

– [Boat Owner] Really nice.

– How does it look down there?

– [Boat Owner] I think that’s all and good, there’s lots of room.

– [Boat Owner] Good?

– Yep.

– [Boat Owner] You’ve got four pieces in there on the inside.

– It’s good. Yeah, I think I’m going to have to just work on the hinges a little bit, to sink them in. I’ll have to do it, I can do it outside. There, that felt really good going in.

– Let’s hear that. Oh yeah, this is going to be better than that.

– Yeah, so.

– [Boat Owner] You’re uh… The gods are smiling on you, you got sun.

– That’s right. [Tony] That looks, that feels really good now.

– Look at that, it fits perfect. There you go.

– Yay, it’s all done.