For some reason, all our closet doors had been removed from the house some years ago. I looked around for replacement doors to buy online from the likes of Home Depot, but Eichler Closet doors are a somewhat unusual size, so there was nothing off the shelf, and custom options were many hundreds of dollars.
I am always looking for justification for buying power tools, so I decided to build some myself. I probably spent $500 on power tools (the same price as getting someone else to build me custom doors) - but the actual materials were way less than $50.
THE LAYOUT
The image below shows the basic layout of what I built:
Each door has three luan panels
In order to make these, I needed for each door to make three luan (plywood) panels, which would fit inside grooves in the frame. The grooves in the frame look like this:
The best way to cut the grooves in the frame would probably be with a Dado blade. However, I bought a cheap table saw that can't take a dado blade. Plus they are illegal in my home country, which didn't make me feel super confident in my newbie ability to operate one safely. So instead of a dado blade, I used a regular blade on a table saw, and just made multiple cuts.
This takes a lot of accuracy to get it to all line up properly as you put it together:
I then measured out three even panels of luan, and ripped them with a circular saw. I made a rough jig to make my cuts straight, but I should have done more as my luan panels were not perfectly square, and that made it harder to get everything to slot together as I assembled it.
Once I had all my pieces, it was time to start joining them. I used dowels to give my joints strength. Drilling holes for dowels through my table-saw cut grooves was hard though. I clamped the piece where I was drilling to avoid it splitting, but it was hard to get the drill location really accurate. Eventually, I got to here:
At this stage, I then had to file down the non-square panels to get the final piece to fit. Slot it in, and clamp everything tight while the glue dries in my joints:
Overall, we were really really happy with these doors. They do exactly what they needed to. Photo of the final version coming soon.
LESSONS LEARNED
- I made too much of an assumption that my timber would be straight. I should have known better. I should have jointed the timber to be square and flat first.
- It was really hard to get my dowels to line up exactly. A doweling jig from Amazon would have probably helped me tremendously. Or cheat and use Biscuits instead of dowels which have a wider margin of error
- Carpenters glue doesn't dry clear. I wanted to varnish these doors instead of paint, but (partly because the doors took time to fit together) there were drips of glue down the wood that are hard to sand off and may mean we have to paint the doors instead.
- Table saws are awesome. Circular saws are tricky. I'm still not quite sure how to rip a large section of plywood to be 100% perfectly square.