BCM 2017: On a New Track (4)

Post 4 in a series describing some repair work on 4 sliding paneled doors, or ita-do, and related sliding track, for the Boston Children's Museum.

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After the frame members were through joinery and finish planed, the stiles received a coat of stain so as to match the rest of the doors:

Rails next, after a coat of stain, which is still wet in the photo below:

The panels and battens had received a lot of wear and tear, exposing raw wood in a number of places, so the four entire panels were given a refresh with stain:

As noted in a previous post, removal of the old frames revealed several broken batten tenons. One of those battens had tenons snapped off of both ends, so I removed the batten from the panel, and placed it in a fixture so I could rout a short mortise for an insert tenon:

Here I'm doing a dry fit of the panel and batten assembly to the two newly made stiles:

The bare patch you can see in the above photo is where the removed batten locates, left off for the trial fit as I know it will fit the mortises just fine.

Everything was fitting up nicely, so I knocking things apart one more time, put the batten back into place, and then glued up using 'Old Brown' hide glue:

Though for many circumstances a 72" rip capacity on a table saw is of limited use, it happens to be an ideal surface for placing a clamped up assembly of about that length :^)

On other panel assemblies, only one batten tenon was broken, so instead of removing the batten to effect a repair, I worked on the joinery in situ using a simple set up like this:

You can spot the just-completed batten mortise in the middle:

At the end of a Sunday, I had three of the four doors glued up, and two of those doors were into a second application of stain. Tomorrow should be the last shop day on this project, and Tuesday is the planned day of install at the BCM. Hope you'll stay tuned for the next installment, and thanks for your visit today! Post 5 is next.