We've got these wood panel doors.
and they are drying out and I don't know if you can see but
you can see there are cracks. See the light through the cracks? The panels are drying out
and down there
so what I am going to do is fill those
cracks. The technique works for painted doors but probably won't work if it has clear varnish on it
but you can see one (crack) here
where I've done it in the past
I'm going to use a technique that boat builders use and
take a natural fiber string
put wood glue on it and pack it in the crack
so
the first thing is to clean the crack out
the door was put together with multiple panels and they used some kind of
filler
and I need to get all that filler out of there. I have been working on it
will utility knife and then cleaned it out with
hacksaw blade. It's whatever will fit in there to clean it out
and get clean wood surfaces on each side of the crack
the next step is to
use a plain piece of natural fiber string
this is a ball of string I got for around a quarter
You want to make the string a little longer at the top and bottom
so you have something to hold on to. I am going to dip the string
in to white wood glue
and then I'm going to pack it in here.
You want the string a little longer at the top because you need to hold on to it.
Otherwise you will start pulling the string down as you pack it
and you will leave a gap at the top. So you leave a bit out, hang on to it as you
pack it in there
usually I use the back of the knife to pack it.
this door is going to take 2 strings, 1 on top the other. The only trick here
you don't want to push the string all the way through to the other side of the door. You don't want
it sticking out the other side of the door.
You can see where it is done.
I've gotten this part in there. It's not consistent yet. I've switched to a flat bladed
screwdriver because I found it's tip fits the crack
much better. If you use something too narrow it tries to
pop all the way through. If you use something too wide it won't go in there
This tool happened to turn out to be the best choice
and of course it has to be cleaned up when I'm finished.
You can see it's going in there. Have lots of wet rags for
cleaning up excess glue.
I'll continue on and show you when it's done.
A sidenote here, when you are doing this, the crack is not the same width all the way
it can go from wider to narrower
crack
what you can do control the width of the string is to twist or untwist it to make it thinner or wider
If you twist it tighter, it gets narrower.
if you untwist it, it gets fatter. You can use that
technique as you go along. Tighter and
loser as needed. If the string is just too wide for the crack
you can untwist and remove one of the sub-parts of the string.
This string has 3 sub-parts and you can remove 1 or 2 to make it fit the crack better.
I finished putting in the string
and I've gone back through and I
held my fingers on the screwdriver at a particular distance
from the tip and gone back over and push the string in to a consistent dept all the way
along, so that I have got room for another string in there
I've also checked the outside to make sure that
the a string has not poked through on the back side. It has not.
That's a good thing. Also you want to make sure that these panels are still flat
You don't want to push the panels out of flatness while you are working.
If you do, you just push them back in place before the glue sets.
Once the glue sets
they will stay in place.
This side is pretty much done.
Once this is caulked and painted you have an airtight watertight seal.
OK, so that's it for now. I will
show you when the second string is in there.
The second string is in. Same process at the first.
Lay the string down. Push it in. Make sure it is at a
consistent depth. Make sure it is below the surface of the wood
that way when you caulk (or putty and hide the crack altogether) it
You need to have some space in there
to get the caulking or putty in there. Make sure the string is at a consistent depth.
Make sure your panels are still flat, that you have not pushed them out of flat
and then clean it up, trim off the end up here
I'll use a knife and trim off the end.
That is pretty much it.
From here, you caulk it (or putty it) and paint it and you're done.
Hope you found this useful.