Door!

Today I picked up a Black & Decker Workmate of my very own, as a stopgap until I have room and resources to build my own workbench.

This post is not about the Workmate.

I got home and set it up and wanted to go out to my (ha ha) back yard and try it out. I was stymied on the way out by the discovery that one of my exterior doors had managed to jam itself in an extremely firm way. Shoving led to opening the lock led to taking the lock apart led to finally hammering the pins out of the hinges, and I discovered that said door had managed to go out of true (i.e. flat and with all the sides perpendicular to each other) in every single way a piece of wood can warp. I was quite impressed.

So I took the door out back and shot it set it up on the Workmate and started looking at what to do about it. I got the Big Box of Planes out and decided that the cupping in the face, while obnoxious, was beyond my ability to really fix assuming the door was even solid. I was pretty sure it was solid because it weighed a fucking ton, but I wasn't totally sure what it made out of, and in any case that would have been a whole lot of work. I did figure I could do something about the sides being way out of whack and that it would solve my immediate problem, and started planing away.

That jointer, the #6 rustbucket? It's big and heavy and ugly and worth every penny.

Long story short, I have a functional exterior door again, significantly more experience planing things, a newfound affection for my #71 router plane, and a big-ass pile of wood shavings (foot inserted for scale). I'm calling it a qualified success because, hey, I have a door that opens and closes again. Qualified because the door is still out of true, causing issues, and the lock mechanism is all funky.