Now that the door is glued up, cleaned up, sanded, and detailed, it is time to cut a big hole in the middle of it. The original design criteria for the door called for no glass whatsoever, but after some discussion we agreed that having at least some sort of peephole would actually be more secure than having to open the door “blind.” The solution was to build a speakeasy door into the interior face of the door, with a leaded glass window on the exterior face. This is actually the part of the project that I’ve been most looking forward to; big stuff is fun for a while, but I love doing tiny stuff.

It might have been easier to cut each half of the window-hole into the door planks before glue-up, but I was worried about things shifting around during glueup, and I wanted to make sure that the opening was completely square, with no “steps.” Hence, glue up the door, then cut a hole in it. I wanted to leave as little to chance as possible (what David Pye would call “workmanship of risk”), so I ended up spending a fair amount of time getting the routing template just right. Really it’s not that far off from cutting a hole to drop a sink into a countertop, except, you know, this is a really nice countertop.

These two pieces were left over from cutting the hole. They will be resawn and joined to make the panel for the speakeasy door.

Gluing up the exterior frame, which will form the rabbet for the leaded glass to fit against. (The frame itself actually sits in its own rabbet in the door’s face.) I used bridal joints to join the relatively thin frame members.

Gluing the window-frame into the exterior face.

Meanwhile…
Making the leaded glass window has been its own mini-adventure. After reading Michael Pekovich’s article on leaded glass in Fine Woodworking, I sort of figured “why not?” A week and a half-dozen trips to the glass shop later, I managed to get the window together. Two lessons (among many others) learned the hard way: 1) Get a soldering iron made specifically for leaded glass. I wasted an entire day trying to make my crummy iron from Radio Shack (which is made for soldering electronics) do what I needed it to, to no avail. Larger irons are expensive, but well worth it. 2) Get the special double-edged scissors made specifically for cutting out lead patterns. I thought maybe I could just measure to account for the web that runs through the lead came (and in between each piece of glass). No. No. No. Anyway, below is the partially-assembled window…

And the fully-assembled window, ready for soldering.

Scrubbing the window with glass cement. I’m told that the vile mess is actually supposed to clean the window as well as secure all the pieces.

The window, cemented and polished, ready for a patina and some wax.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

The two window-hole cutouts are resawn and joined, and I wanted to cut a little V-groove in the middle of the panel to match the chamfers on the two door planks which contain the window. (Thus maintaining the shadow line running up the middle of the door.) I ground the blade of my smallest shoulder plane into a V and clamped a fence to the panel. This worked tolerably at best; I still needed to clean up and define the groove with the corner of a tiny scraper after using the plane. Really I just should have a made a V-shaped molding plane in the first place. Lesson not so much learned as reinforced: making a tool from scratch is almost always going to work better than to try and modify an old one.

Applying the first coat of varnish to the speakeasy door panel. The first coat of finish is always one of may favorite parts of a project.

Gluing up the door frame around the prefinished panel.

Mortising the hinges for the Tiny Door. I love working with Sanderson hinges: beautiful to look at, a dream to install.

And finally, fitting the Tiny Door into the Tiny Frame (which will eventually be get into a rabbet on the interior face of the door.

I went into the Doorframe-phase of this project thinking “Well, the door’s built. The frame shouldn’t be too bad.” Dumb. I should also mention that I’ve said “Well, the [blank] is built, so the [blank-blank] shouldn’t be too bad” every single time I have ever built anything. But this time, I’m sure, will be different. Yes, sir. Anyway, below is a full-scale drawing of the top of the doorframe arch:

It took me a little while to figure out how the frame was going to go together; I’ve been thinking about the door itself (which is essentially a 2-D object) for so long, it was difficult to switch back to more three-dimensional thinking. The head-scratcher was how to make a 2″ rabbet in a 7″ frame? Gluing up an oversize frame and rabbeting everything with a router seemed wasteful (and potentially disastrous.) The solution (or at least as best as I could tell) was to build two frames: one that was the thickness of the door, and would fit around the door (and would serve as the interior part of the door frame), and a double-thickness frame which was slightly smaller than the door (which would be the exterior side of the frame.) Gluing the two frames together would form a rabbet for the door to shut against. But I think I am getting ahead of myself – below, the exterior threshold is being planed and detailed before glue up:

Gluing up the exterior frame. Unlike gluing the arched door, where the two halves of the arched top came together from the sides, the arch of the frame was glued up as one unit (making a kind of “hat.”) Then the arch, threshold, and sides were glued together to form the frame.

Cutting out the arch with a router/trammel jig. The trick was locating the exact center of the arch in space (hence the clamped-on support beam.) The dust collector seems to be sleeping in this morning.

Cleaning up and detailing the exterior frame.

Clamping the two frames together. The temporary cross-pieces helped keep everything square and registered.

So… the insides of the box, as well as both sides of the top and bottom panels, are finished and waxed. The box is ready for glue up. One of the nice things about doing a box this size is that you can tap the dovetails home and basically be done with it, rather than fussing with clamps and cauls.

After the glue is dried, the sides are cleaned up and and planed. At this point the box is still one closed unit. The next step is to saw apart the lid and body. I prefer to use a handsaw for this operation (as opposed to a tablesaw or bandsaw) because it leaves a much thinner kerf. This means that the grain will have less of a “jump” from one section to the other, and more importantly, I can saw through the middle one of the dovetail pins (which was intentionally cut wider than the other pins), leaving a half-pin on both sections. I make the cuts themselves very slowly, rotating the box to a new face every few strokes.

Here is a detail of the split-line separating the lid and bottom of the box:

The box is split open. It is hard to tell from this picture, but there is a shallow groove cut into the inside of the box. The groove was spaced to correspond with the split-line, so that when the lower half of the box receives that lip, there will be a matching rabbet in the lid to accept the lip. This is all much, much less complicated than it sounds.

Gluing the lip into place.

The first coat of oil on the exterior of the box.

Three coats of oil and two coats of wax later, the box is ready to be packed up and shipped off to its new home.