I think you guys are being unnecessarily harsh. First off we don't know that the original door was not fitted well. We do know it was custom cut to an inch or so shorter so one could infer that it was custom fitted. Please explain what is wrong with lofting the hinge positions from the original door. We stress all the time about doing less measuring and doing more direct transferring of measurements. What better story stick for hinge and latch placement could there be than the original door (if it was good to begin with)? To me, it sure seems better than laying a tape on the hinge jam a writing down hinge placements.
I am really curious about this because I have just gone through this process with a house my wife sold this past year. It had old, worn and dated hollow core doors that needed to be replaced. The frames were metal, plastered in, with no trim. I looked at each door to see how the reveals looked and decided the best way to get the hinge placements were directly from the old door. In most cases, I also trimmed the top of the door to match the old one. I left the bottoms alone as they had been trimmed for carpet and that had already been removed so the old doors had too much clearance to the floors. I also lofted the doorknob positions and trimmed the door widths as they were all different. It worked pretty well, so I wound up using the same technique when I replaced three more doors in our present home. In this case the doors were hung in well placed frames, plumb, straight and level, so I didn't need to trim the doors at all. What am I missing?
