On 8/23/2011 11:11 AM, Ken wrote:
On Monday, August 22, 2011 11:53:27 PM UTC-4, dpb wrote:

What kind of door (construction, material (solid/veneer/mdf), etc., etc., )?

In solid doors I see the shrink/swell cycle regularly; I'd suspect
something else going on other than just humidity changes...

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These are all wood doors, but I see it happening on either solid wood
doors (typically exterior) or veneer (interior with a solid glued-up
core with veneer over that). This is in old houses from the 1920s,
so there should have been plenty of time for the humidity
expansion/contraction cycle to "settle out" into it's summer maximum
and winter minimum range.

I didn't mention before that I'm in the Northeast US, so we have
humid summers (and no A/C in the house), and cold winters with forced
air heat. So I completely understand that there should be large
swings in expansion and contraction due to humidity.

The thing is that the summer maximum seems to continuously increase
and I have to keep planing doors. There is one interior door on the
first floor (sits on a solid foundation, so there is little or no
structural movement over time) that has expanded so much I needed to
remove the mortised lockset, plane the strike side of the door about
3/16", cut the mortise deeper, and then reassemble everything. And
that wasn't the first time that door had been planed. In that case I
figured planing the strike side was easier than planing the hinge
side and having to re-mortise two hinges.

The point to all this is that some doors have "grown" more than 1/4"
in width since the house was built.

Ken,
Ya' got me...any chance of posting some pictures on one of the hosting
sites?

In an earlier life did a lot of restoration on old Federal and earlier
(some ante- many shortly postbellum) in the Lynchburg, VA, area, that is
also quite humid in summer, relatively drier in winter but not,
obviously, nearly as cold as the NE could be. I never ran across such
an experience there even with the sometimes very large doors.

Currently in '10s-built farmhouse also w/ original solid frame and panel
doors and there's never been such an observation, either. This is, of
course, a much drier climate but far more extreme in temperature swings.

I'd suggest posting the question to rec.woodworking; there are some
others there w/ lots of experience in your area plus some others in wet
climates that might have some ideas; this being such an apparent change
in width is not anything I've ever observed.

The thing is, long-grain doesn't expand/contract w/ moisture at all (in
comparison as you obviously know) so all the change in dimension for a
conventionally-constructed panel door has to come from the stiles which
one would presume are only something like 6-8" each. The amount of
dimension change over that distance that you're seeing is remarkable...

Any idea the species of the wood out of curiosity?

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