Door frame: production materials, parameters, design

The box beam with which the opening is framed is one of the door component elements. It is clear that when the web is aluminum, steel or plastic, the box is made of the same materials.

As for the interior options, the door frame for sliding doors, as well as for swinging and swinging canvases, can be made not only from an array, but also from various artificially created materials. We will describe further what door frames of interior doors are, and the video in this article will serve as a visual aid to the presented material.

Solid wood and its alternatives

Everyone knows that doors made of solid wood are the most highly valued. It is clear that exoticism brought from the tropics is more expensive due to delivery, although its quality is also excellent. And what about inexpensive wood growing in our latitudes: spruce, pine, linden, birch?

• From this list, the door frame can be made only from pine. The rest of the wood either cracks and cracks easily, or has many knots and other defects. It is the wood knots that are the greatest problem for joinery - and the point here is not at all in the beauty of the wood pattern.
• For the manufacture of the box it is necessary to cut a longitudinally solid timber. Any defects on it can be masked with a putty, but this cannot save the tree from internal stress that has arisen inside the defective zone.
• The stress in the timber contributes to the deformation of the finished joinery, which is manifested already in the process of operation. To get such gorgeous doors, as in the picture below, the wood must be carefully sorted.

In nature, it is not so often found without any defects at all. From here and the high cost of an array of varieties "extra", which has the necessary quality and appearance. The price of the product depends not only on the grade, but also on the degree of value of the breed.

Traditionally for the manufacture of high-quality luxury doors, beech, oak, ash are used. In honor as the breed with reddish hues: cherry, walnut, alder, eucalyptus, which is usually referred to as "red tree."

Glued beam

The larger the size of the timber, the greater the likelihood of his natural defects. Therefore, interior doorframes are often made from spliced ​​timber.

Note! To make it, the boards are spread on small bars of small section, and remove the defective areas. First, under the press, glue the side faces, getting short fragments, then their ends are spiked, and glue along the length. The result is a durable glued laminated timber without any defects in the mass.

Using the same technology, they also make glued slabs (furniture panels), from which trim elements of the door leaf trimming, make panels. For the manufacture of elements of panel doors, use cheaper carpentry plates.

For their gluing, defective wood is also used, since the slab is faced on both sides with hard fiberboard or plywood.

MDF and HDF

If the spliced ​​timber and slabs are, albeit not solid in mass, but still natural wood, then materials made from wood flour, sawdust and wood chips, to a greater extent can be attributed to composites.

These are medium and high density plates, abbreviated to MDF and HDF. They have a fairly large size range, including the thickness, which allows you to make absolutely any details of door panels and boxes.

So:

• Considering that the standard thickness of the box beam is at least 30 mm, plates with the corresponding thickness are used in its manufacture. Non-standard door frames for massive doors can be made from sheets of greater thickness (up to 60 mm).
• MDF is treated in the same way as ordinary wood, and is used not only in the manufacture of interior doors, but also street doors (see Making doors of various kinds). To obtain a material that is resistant to moisture, the plates are still impregnated with special primer during the production process.
• It must be said, due to its density and the presence of polymeric binders, MDF is much less hygroscopic than most wood species. Its dense and homogeneous mass makes it possible to produce deep profiling and milling without any problems - operations without which the manufacture of a box beam does not cost.

So, choosing an option for your home, do not forget about the advantages of this material. The main of them is stability in relation to the change of temperature in the room or on the street, due to which, both the individual parts of the door, and the fasteners mounted on them, are kept more securely than on the wood.

Laminated Composites

A composite is a tandem of two or more types of raw materials or materials that can be mixed in bulk, like MDF, or have a layer-by-layer structure. The last version of the people firmly stuck the name "sandwich", the reason why the great similarity with the eponymous "masterpiece" of the food industry.

Note! The surfaces of the elements of doors made of composite materials are veneered with artificial veneer, which ideally imitates the natural texture of wood. It is a high-strength plastic (CPL), which manufacturers call ekoshpon.

The composites themselves can consist of different layers: including layers of an inexpensive array, plywood, or the same MDF - which we see in the photo below.

So:

• The multilayer structure provides this material with the necessary strength with a large margin. It cannot be said that this is a cheaper option - the box timber from the ekoshpon is approximately in the same price niche with products from MDF. The cost is about 300 rubles. for one timber.
• It is even more expensive than the cost of unpainted pine timber, but it does not require a facial finish. Typically, the length of the rack is 2150 mm: U-shaped box consists of three bars, in the O-shaped, to which is added another threshold.
• It is very convenient that when we purchase a door frame, we can purchase a timber not in a set, but separately. In any case, when a double door is mounted, one does not have to buy two sets of boxes when one is enough.
• Correspondingly, the finishing plates are also bought, allowing the box to be extended in width, and the trim plates (see How to install the trim plates on the door), which is used to frame the outer surfaces of the opening.

The eco-tile coating makes these parts not only very aesthetic, but also protects them from accidental mechanical damage, which are particularly susceptible to solid woodwork.

Features door frames

What do the door boxes are made of, we discussed. Further instruction concerns the design features of the box beam, its dimensions and installation features. As with any molded product, it has three main parameters. How are they justified?

The parameters of the box beam

In cross section, this is the width that is tied to the thickness of the wall or partition, and the thickness that will provide the product with the necessary bearing capacity. For standard interior doors, these dimensions are 30 * 70 mm, and 35 * 75 mm.

If you look closely at the drawings given in the 1988 Standard No. 6629, you will see that the width of the door leaf is everywhere less than the width of the opening by 70 mm. If the door is double, the difference is 72 mm.

So:

• This distance is made up of the thickness of two standpoints, plus the gaps in the vestibule of the door, on both sides. These gaps are usually regulated during the installation of the box, because in the walls, especially brick, deviations from the nominal dimensions of the openings can be 5-6 mm.
• The minimum width of the box corresponds to the minimum thickness of the interior partition - 65 mm. As a rule, such partitions are brick - when laying bricks on the edge, or it is plasterboard structures.
• Maximum, the standard box beam will have a width of 75 mm. In the apertures of thicker walls, it is necessary either to arrange plaster slopes, or to veneer the shoals with additional strips. It looks schematically, as shown in the pictures below.

The length of the uprights, of which two are included, with a small margin corresponds to the standard height of the opening (2080 or 2150 mm). The length of the cross member is usually exactly half the length of the rack box. If the door is one and a half or two doors, you can simply buy three racks.

Profile configuration

In its form, the cross section of the traditional box beam resembles the letter "L". The only difference is that its protruding part can have either a simple geometric contour, or be profiled.

Boxes designed for the installation of ordinary platband, do not have longitudinal grooves on the side faces. But there are options designed for the installation of telescopic platbands, the shelves of which are inserted into the grooves on the box.

All of these options are presented in the examples below:

A slightly different configuration has a box beam for mounting sliding doors. It is also telescopic, but it has a different thickness and width, since one here, each stack is mounted from two bars, connected by a docking plate with strips of a compactor pasted on it.

The bar set on one side only. On the other hand, the bars do not connect at all, since the door leaf must enter the internal cavity of the partition. Instead of adding, a brush seal is inserted into the internal grooves. What this whole construction looks like is clearly seen in the picture above.

And the last option is a novelty on the joinery market. This is a box beam, which is mounted in a cavity in the wall, and allows you to install the door flush with its surface. In this case, it is not required to frame the opening with the casing, as no joints will be visible. Thus, having issued a door in the same style with the wall, it can be made almost invisible.

You can see for yourself - only a small gap in the vestibule, but the door handle gives out the presence of the opening. On such a box, the canvas is hung only on hidden hinges. Usually such doors are sold complete with fittings and a box, which consists of a wooden bar and a profile aluminum lining.

The nuances of mounting the traditional box

Manufacturers of doors often take care of the consumer, applying notches and hauls to the door leafs, making the assembly as easy as possible with their own hands, and with a minimum set of tools. This is even more convenient, since these doors are usually completed with fittings.

However, each medal has a downside. You may not be satisfied with the hinges offered by the manufacturer, while others can no longer be put in there - so when buying doors you need to pay attention to these nuances.

By the way, the above diagram clearly shows at what points it is necessary to install the door hinges. On it you can see where and what gaps should be provided when installing the door unit.

The box can be assembled in two versions:

1. First cut side elements, and the transverse beam is placed between them, in special grooves.
2. First cut a shorter transverse element., which is then laid over the ends of the racks.

To properly cut the details of the box, you first need to accurately determine the mounting scheme. The second option is easier to perform, since you do not need to cut dowels and grooves at the ends of the parts.

The elements of the block are fastened to the ends of the opening with dowels or anchors - they are embedded in the mounting holes, and covered with decorative plugs. When the door frame is securely fixed, the gaps between it and the wall are filled with polyurethane foam, and from the outside they are hidden by the installation of trim.