On 8/23/11 12:11 PM, 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

My daughter's house in CT built 1955 has the same problem. Original
hollow core (mahogany veneer over pine core) doors need
planing/rasping every year for the 8 years they've been in house. Plus
re-mortising at times

Can wood still "grow" after being cut, milled, etc ????