Panel doors production: how it happens

Interior doors are not only functional, but also fully participate in interior design. In the expectation that they will serve more than one decade, their choice and the quality of the installation should receive the most attention.

Despite the huge variety, the panel doors are especially popular among the people. What is it, and how is this design better than the shield variant? How is the production and glazing of the panel door carried out? On these issues, we will try to provide comprehensive information that will support that video in this article.

Frame-shield doors: what are the advantages

Getting acquainted with the proposals of companies representing their products to the consumer’s court, one can see how huge the range of interior doors can be. Products differ not only in material production and design, but also in options for facial finishing, performance properties, and, of course, design features.

• How not to get lost in this abundance, and choose exactly what you need? To do this, it is necessary, at a minimum, to understand how a particular type of door looks like. By and large, the canvases of all interior doors are divided into two main groups. The first option is a shield, or as it is also called, a blank sheet, which you can see in the photo below.

• The shield can be made of spliced ​​pine bars, DPS or plywood, and the top is lined with veneer. Depending on the filling and the quality of the face coating, the price of the products also varies. These doors look solid, and serve for a long time. Their advantages include the ease of installation of canvases and tie-in locks (see Installing a lock in an interior door: professional instruction).

The only thing that can be qualified as a minus is a solid weight, which usually provokes sagging of the canvas. Yes, and the appearance of the deaf smooth canvases rather simple. The main emphasis in their design is on the natural texture of wood or veneer used in the manufacture of products.

Panel paintings: features

Now consider what the panel doors, which will be discussed in our article. They belong to the second group, combining frame-panel structures. In them from wooden bars only the framework gathers. Fill it either with glazing or with small-sized thyroid inserts, which are called the panel.

• The use of inserts makes it possible to rid the door leaf of the drawbacks inherent in shield doors. Due to the panels, the weight of the product and its cost are reduced. But the most important thing is that the appearance of the canvases, which at the same time provide an interesting relief surface, is significantly improved.

• In this case, the beauty of the door depends more on the number and shape of the panels than on the natural qualities of the wood. By the way, the production of panel doors can do without it. Sheet MDF is a wonderful and inexpensive material that the vast majority of interior door blocks are made of today.
• Sheets used in production can have a laminated, veneered or painted surface. However, the doors can also be made of simple material, without a facial finish - the so-called “painted” version. It is these doors that are most often installed in high-rise apartment buildings that are being commissioned with a rough finish.

The most interesting thing is that to make panel doors with your own hands, though not easy, but it is quite possible. To do this, you just need to have the appropriate tool, skills to work with it, and the necessary information, which we will gladly share with you.

Binding of a cloth

As already mentioned, the panel canvas consists of a frame (frame, strapping) - who likes what definition, as well as inserts attached to it. The frame assumes all the loads, so it must be made so that the web is provided with lateral and longitudinal stiffness, resistance to mechanical stress.

• Therefore, the production of panel doors involves the use of well-dried wood, or MDF, for this purpose. The frame consists of at least five bars, which completely ensures its spatial rigidity. Two of them are racks, two are horizontal elements (lower and upper tsarg), and one horizontal crossbar (centerpiece) that separates the lower third of the canvas, or divides it in half.

Note! One of the options for frame-panel doors are tsargovye design. In them, the tsargs are not only the elements of the strapping, but also the filling elements. That is, from them the cloth is completely gathered. Pillars in panel doors are only elements of the frame (lining), in which grooves are provided for connecting with panels.

• The joining of these parts is made only by the spike method or pins, which saves the product from temperature deformations. You may think that glueless connections are unreliable, but this, believe me, is not at all like that. The panel itself does not carry any loads, but serves only a decorative role - and yet it is strong enough, since it has a thickness of at least 18 mm.

Since the panel is a profile product that can have not only a rectangular, but also a curvilinear configuration, it is clear that the complexity of the execution of the door depends on the number of inserts. This can not but affect the cost of the product: budget products have a maximum of one or two panels, in expensive versions of interior doors, there may be six, or even eight. Well, the design of the entrance doors, often provide twice as many.

Facial trim: what to choose

We have dealt with the construction of frame-panel doors, now we will pay attention to such an issue as the front door trim. Which option is still better: painting, lamination, or veneering? With doors made of solid wood, everything is simple - their surface is polished, sometimes tinted, and then varnished.

• Use in the production of fiberboard and other wood derivatives, involves a more solid surface finish, which, as a rule, imitates the wood pattern. This can be done only by lamination or veneering material. In the first case, for this purpose, using a decorative coating called laminatin.
• In short, this is a paper with a wood pattern printed on it, impregnated with resins and glued to the backing. Wood sheet material is driven through a special machine on which a laminatin roll is installed. Gluing is carried out under heating and pressure, after which MDF sheets are already laid on blanks.

• As for the veneer, it is no longer paper, but a thin layer of wood, which is removed from the rounded log. For the manufacture of veneer are only valuable wood. This material can be both rolled and sheet, but the sheets are usually small, since their width corresponds to the circumference of the log.
• Veneering is the correct way to process chipboard veneer and then you will understand why. First, sheets with the same pattern are selected, stacked and, using a laser-guided blade, the edges are cut off smoothly. For pasting sheets of large format, pieces of veneer literally sew and glue together.
• The material intended for finishing the outer side of the door leaf has a multi-layer structure. It is glued from three sheets of veneer. The one that goes to the outer side is fitted according to the picture so that it is a mirror image of the inner side - well, what is rejected during sorting goes into the middle.
• The middle sheet is coated with glue on both sides, and already the outer sheets are glued to it, passing through a hot press. It turns out a kind of three-layer plywood, which is why this process was called “veneer”. At the final stage, the material is polished and varnished, and then reveted with a door leaf.

• By the way, veneered doors do not necessarily have to be made of chipboard or MDF, which only a stretch can be called environmentally friendly. It can be natural wood, only cheaper pine lined, say, oak veneer.

Modern equipment used in factories for the production of doors, allows you to connect the veneer to the base very securely, so you can be sure that nothing will come unstuck in time. Accidental scratches do not threaten such a coating either, so it is safe to say that veneered doors are the best option in terms of price and quality.

Organization of the production process

Door panels of the shield type, assembled from spliced ​​pine bars, and this not only makes the door heavier, but also increases the consumption of material. The use of elements such as panels allows you to simplify and cheapen the process as much as possible, so manufacturers, especially beginners, place their main emphasis on panel doors.

So:

• If you decide to start producing doors as a small business, the information we offer in this article will be a good help for you. Of course, household carpentry tools are not enough here.

• At a minimum, a circular saw, a milling cutter, and a format-cutting machine are needed, the main functions of which are the formation of a perfectly flat cut. In appearance, it resembles a sawmill, but there the lumber moves freely, and here it is rigidly fixed relative to the cutting surfaces.
• Such equipment is equipped with quick-response mechanisms, and when working with it is important not to forget about safety. You should not start work on the machine, or use the manual version of the same router or miter saw, if you have not learned its device, the operating rules, are not convinced of its serviceability.
• The manufacturer’s instructions are the main document to be studied, which is called “from cover to cover”. If you are going to set up production and purchased the machines, only those people who have received production training can be allowed to work with them, and they have a document certifying this fact.

When it comes to making one or more doors for yourself, you can try to do with a workbench, a staple, a hacksaw and a chisel, but without a router, albeit a manual one, you cannot make a beautiful panel. By the way, stick laminated to the surface, or veneer, can also be manually, and if you wish, you can easily find a training video.

How to collect the canvas

So, we have already said that the panel door frame is assembled from at least five bars, and the gaps between them are filled with panels. If the upper part of the canvas is glazed, then there will be only one panel - and this is the simplest version of the panel door.

In general, the number of inserts depends on the number of intermediate crossbars or racks. They kind of draw the plane of the canvas into rectangles, and the more of them, the smaller the size of the panels.

• The number of inserted elements also increases. In the example below, you see that there is not one mullion at the doors, but two, which made it possible to provide an additional insert. As you can see, both glazed and unglazed doors acquire a more elegant appearance.

• The production of the panels is started only after all the blanks for the outer strapping of the frame are made, and it is partially assembled. As a matter of fact, first of all they connect one rack with the empty and upper profile. In order to avoid deviations in size, the mediators are cut after measurement, in fact.
• First, a bar of the required length is cut off, and a spike is cut at its end so that it can be installed in the frame groove. Next, make a fitting: inserting the mullion into the frame, make a pencil mark on the level, and only then a thorn is cut at the second end. The more panels will be on the canvas, the more intermediaries will have to install.

Horizontal elements are always the length correspond to the width of the door. If it is necessary to install intermediate stands, then their length is equal to the distance between two transverse centers.

The order of assembly by default is always the same: first put larger elements, and then smaller ones. After the inside of the web is filled, it is closed with a second staple piece.

How do the panels

The dimensions of the future panels are also measured after the fact - after the horizontal centers are installed on the frame of the canvas. If there are several identical panels on the canvas, then it is best to cut off the gauge rail and focus when measuring on it.

• Cutting it, you need to reduce the value of 5-6 mm, to give the rail to move freely in the frame, not resting on the harness. However, when moving the gauge rail should not go out of the grooves. Thus, with temperature expansion of the finished web, its parts will be able to move freely, and deformation can be avoided.
• Now you need to make a template template. It is cut out of a piece of hardboard, or plywood, tried on in the cell of the frame of the canvas, and only then proceed to the manufacture of the panel itself. The presence of a well-calibrated pattern will simplify the process of cutting the panels, reduce the time it would take for multiple measurements and fitting. And the more complex the form of the panels, the more valuable the template.

• After the blank is cut under the panel, the most crucial moment comes. After all, this is a profile product that makes up all the beauty of the panel door. This very profile is called a figaret field, and in order to cut it, you need a special attachment for the milling cutter. Options for processing the ends of this part may be different, after which the edges will have a different profile.

The essence of processing is to turn thick rectangular ends of the details into elegant ridges, called figareas, which easily fit into the grooves of the harness. In the process of milling, the volume part is removed from the ends of the workpiece, as a result of which the edges become thinner.

They are polished, inserted into a frame, and then pressed with kalevkah, like bead. In conclusion, dust is removed from the product, the canvas is primed and proceed to finishing.