In
another thread a while ago I asked for advice on how to replace a door sill. Since I got so much useful suggestions from the good people here I thought, let's do a follow up with the result and how I put their advice into practice. I finished this a while ago by now, but never came round to writing it all up before. Some may find this interesting, some other not.
(note: I wanted to post this with expandable thumbnail images, but since thumbnails can only be used with attached images and the forum's limit for attachments is a total of 500 kb I had to revert to putting all the images in my gallery and now they can only be posted full size. Sorry for that, it would have looked better organised with thumbnails.)
It started out with this rotten piece of wood:
Now the first step of course would be to remove it. This was very easy since it was so rotten I could pull it apart with my hands. I used a chisel to scrape away all loose parts and finally cleaned it up with a brush and a vacuum cleaner. Then with a hand saw I sawed off the lower 10 cm of the door jambs on the left and the right side.
Now it is time to fit the new door sill. I had it pre-made by my local wood dealer because I myself have no band saw or table saw big enough to cut this at the right angle. To give it a good basic protection I painted it with 2 layers of top class primer by Sikkens, Onol HS before putting it in. Next to the door sill is one of the two new inserts for the jambs.
As with old houses, everything is uneven. Though the sill was at the exact length on the front side it was a bit too wide at the back so I had to cut a small triangular slice off. Not with a nice Kapex, but the old fashioned way, by hand.
Went really well though, just had to make sure my cut stayed completely straight. Then I could fit it in. I also had to saw and cut the right shape out of the jamb replacement by hand.
But now the other side.
I didn't have my camera with me when I made the right jamb but you can see here how I did it for the left. First had to saw the right angle in it so it would fit the angle of the sill. Then, when making the first fit, I realised the wooden piece was still 5mm to thick, despite the fact that I had measured it up correctly at forehand. But it turned out the existing jamb wasn't exactly square. As always with those pesky old houses here.
So I had to make it a bit thinner to make it fit properly. The Rotex was really useful for this. Some Crystal 60 grit made short work out of it. Because I didn't have the opportunity to bring my CTL22 along you can see quite some dust on the bench. But when using the Rotex for this, you do have to be careful to keep it as straight as possible or else you will start to round over the edges, and you don't want that.
With the jamb part at the right shape and thickness now I had to cut out the profile. Could have done it by hand with a saw or a chisel but it seemed easier to me to do it with the router. Time to take my DW613 out of the box, which is a very nice piece of work, despite what some people have to say about DeWalt. Got it over 10 years now and not even a speck of rust on it. Routed out the back part by hand without any guide rail or something like that. Had to take care to not let the base tip over on such a small part.
Lets see how it fits again. When I'm working on a part, be it wood, metal or plastic, I keep fitting it with every step.
Looks good to me. Then I have to cut out a piece where the profile on the underside of the door will fit in. For this I use a small wood carving chisel by Nooitgedagt. This thing just stays sharp, no matter how much wood I carved with it already.
Lets fit it again.
And from another angle:
Now, as a short intermezzo, have a look at the systainer in the back of last picture. They are just so great to move tools around. Especially when you're sort of 'vehicularly challenged' like me. I don't have a nice van. Or any car for that matter. I simply have a bike, which I sometimes use in what I call the FestoMobile configuration.
The systainer fits perfectly on the back of my FestoMobile and I can stack up to sys7 (a sys3 and a sys4, or alike in value) on the back without becoming unstable. And if I don't make them too heavy, and drive carefully, I can carry a stack of sys8 in my hand to total it out to sys15 if needed. Not that I do that much
, but when needed it's so very comfortable to be able to carry that much with you. Before I used systainers, this wasn't possible.
Of course I don't believe so much in Festool's 'One-tool-per-systainer' philosophy, but have expanded on that to my "Fit-in-as-much-as-you-possibly-can' philosophy.
But lets get on with it. All the wood is at the right size and shape now. So now I can fit everything in for real and attach it to it's surroundings. The sill is connected to the bricks under it with 3 8x150mm hammer plugs. Under it I emptied an entire canister of acetylene caulking. Then I put the two jamb pieces in. At the front I connect them with two screws and plugs to the walls behind it, at the back I connect them with two screws to the sill. I think they're secured pretty tight now. Btw, I only used rust proof screws for this. If you don't they will start to rust at some point and in time you'll see a brown colouring break through the surface, even with paint and filler over it.
Then it's time to smooth everything out and fill all the gaps up with a 2 part epoxy filler. To do it right you got to find the right balance between 'good filled' and 'not too thick'. Since the stuff I used needs to set an entire day I wanted to fill it out in one time. On other occasions I use stuff that sets in 15 minutes and then it's no problem to do a 2nd layer if it's a bit too short here and there (in fact, two layers is more or less standard for me). But now I had to make sure to fill it up all nicely at once without too much excess. If you put on too much it is sanding it flush the next day because it becomes really hard.
Up close:
Then the next day I could start sanding. Well, 2 days later actually because it was getting cold outside already and the epoxy wouldn't set in one day. Didn't matter, I'm not a pro on a tight schedule and I can work when I want.
Brought the Rotex and the Deltex with me and my first idea was to put the Rotex on it but the Deltex with some 80 grit Brilliant 2 was enough to get it all smooth. Forgot the camera though
, so no pics for this stage. Well, you can imagine for yourself what it looks like, not too difficult. After sanding it all I applied another coat of primer again because the sanding will expose the wood at some places.
After that I came back the next day and painted the sill and lower jambs with the good finish paint. The next day I painted the entire wood frame and the door to finish it all. And another day after that I did the very last thing, and that was to put some caulk around it all to fill up the gaps between the wood and the bricks.
Finished
.
