Plywood arch do it yourself

Not only a properly chosen beautiful and expensive door can add originality to a doorway, but also a change of its rectangular configuration to an arched one. Moreover, the arch of plywood with their own hands can be made even by those who have never tried their hand at creating any bulk structures from this material.

There are two main methods of creating an arch of plywood with your own hands.

Option One

If you are not sure that you can bend the plywood sheet smoothly and smoothly to give it the shape of a semicircle, then you can use this option to create an arch with your own hands:

• Prepare the tool you need when working with plywood: electric jigsaw, grinding machine (but you can do with just a piece of emery paper), a screwdriver, a hacksaw.
• You will also need a pencil, ruler, self-tapping screws (for wood and for concrete), polyurethane foam, polystyrene foam, plywood, wooden blocks and small boards.
• Start by dismantling the door frame, if it was previously installed in this doorway. Remove the remaining foam, pieces of mortar and other unnecessary protrusions on its sides.
• Then you need to carefully measure the doorway, the top of which you are going to round out. Remember that when you arrange the arch in a normal doorway, you slightly reduce its area. But to increase the opening itself you will not succeed, since in its upper part lies a reinforced concrete beam, which holds all the upstream bricks or blocks from falling down. Of course, if desired, the top of the opening can be completely disassembled to the top floor, make the arch taller, and the rest also closed with plywood so that you do not have to install a reinforced concrete beam.
• Now you need to draw on the plywood an arch shape that fits exactly to your doorway. Please note that in the central part of it you can go almost to "zero", that is, to the level of the lower edge of the reinforced concrete beam. And the side of your arch should not go beyond the doorway.
• Having decided on the arch configuration, cut wooden blocks 5-6 centimeters less than the side of the plywood arch (they should not look out from the bottom of the arch) and attach them to the top of the sides of the doorway with self-tapping screws on the concrete. The bars must be fixed in such a way that the plywood attached to them forms one plane with the wall surface around the door.
• Similarly, cut the wooden bars to attach the upper part of the arch of plywood and secure them to the concrete beam.
• Attach to the bars arch, cut out of plywood.
• To fill the "body" of the arch, use foam and assembly foam.
• On the bottom edge of the plywood arch, fasten the small planks so that their bottom edge does not look out of the arch. The length of the plates must exactly match the thickness of the arch.
• Fill the space between the planks with foam.

• Wait for the assembly foam to dry, cut off its excess and putty over the entire surface of the arch using a serpyanka (mesh tape that has one sticky side).
• Paint or paint over the arch with wallpaper.
• Along the perimeter of the arch, you can decorate it by laying out a decorative stone.

The second option. Bent plywood

And in this case, all the work begins with the preparation of the doorway, freeing it from the old doorframe, and leveling the side and top surfaces of the slopes. Then you need to carefully measure the opening to make the drawing of the future arch. To do this, take a thick cardboard and draw on it the lower part of the arch. Then cut it - you need the lower part of the cardboard, which will become a kind of stencil.

1. Measure the length of the lower semicircular part of the arch on your stencil.
2. Add one centimeter from each side and, using the size obtained, cut a rectangle of plywood, the width of which should be equal to the thickness of the walls of the doorway. Roughly cut the short portions of the rectangle to an acute angle (this will allow the plywood to "smoothly" go into the doorway when you fix it on it).
3. Soak the plywood thoroughly with water so that it becomes flexible and does not crack when trying to bend it.
4. Attach wet plywood to the doorway, fix the center of the sheet with self-tapping screws, and fasten it to the reinforced concrete beam.
5. Adjust the position of the plywood by placing a cardboard stencil on the bottom. Secure the lower part of the arch with screws.
6. Wait until the plywood is completely dry.

Now you just have to fill the space between the arch bent in the form of an arch and the upper part of the doorway (use pieces of foam plastic and assembly foam for this), and then putty the surfaces, leveling them with the walls adjacent to the arch.

A photo

One of the options for the construction of the arch of plywood: