BOOK LIBRARY DOOR PREP

Flip a coin. Heads or tails? Ah, tails it is - looks like we’re making the door for our little lending library book box first.

Materials needed for this part of the project are as follows:

• 2 x 2.4 metre lengths of par timber approx. 4.5 cm wide x 1.8 cm deep
• 1 x sheet of 2 mm thick clear Perspex
• 4 x 50mm angle plates for door corners
• 2 x 75mm tee plates for central door support
• 3 x small flush hinges
• 1 x door knob
• 1 x door hook clasp

Metal plates for extra bracing on the frame

Flush hinges and door clasp

Begin by making a mitred frame that fits on top of the box front.

Cut mitred pieces of timber to make a door frame

Glue the frame together at each corner.

Glue your frame together at each mitred corner

Add a wooden strut to the middle of the frame for extra support.

Adding extra support to the middle of the frame

On the inner side of the door frame, position your hinges along the left-hand edge of the frame to correspond with fixing position along the rim of the box. Don’t worry too much at this stage about fully fitting the hinge into place as this can’t really be done until the door frame has been painted.

Add hinges

A word here about hinges. Disclaimer - Being DIYers and not carpenters then it’s a job to know what type of hinge you should be using for this kind of thing or how best to fit them. If you know of a better/proper way of doing this bit then great but for us, this part is trial and error.

Put plastic on frame to work out sizing

With your hinges in place, lay your sheet of Perspex down on top of your frame to work out sizing. I bought my clear Perspex from an Ebay seller who specialized in cutting it down to size. However, as I didn’t have exact sizes at the time then there’s a small bit to lop off on one side.

Cutting the plastic

Two millimetre thickness doesn’t sound like much but when it comes to cutting plastic it can be a big deal especially if you don’t have specialist cutting tools and as always, there are a million and one ways to cut Perspex according to the internet.

We tried scoring it with a sharp knife. (Who is Stanley and why did he invent a knife?) Using brute force and ignorance, scoring barely touched the sides. But it did leave a nice line clearly marked out on which to try something else.

A small fine-toothed hack-saw, our next tool of choice, did little other than splinter some of the edging. Pants!

Having almost given up the ghost, the other half dug into his box of power tool tricks and brought out a Dremel multi-tool. Using a small rotary blade to slice through the plastic, slowly but surely, finally the bugger was cut down to size.

With your plastic sheet cut to fit inside the wooden door frame, place your angle and tee plates on top and mark out their fixing positions using a sharp pencil. Mark the location of screw holes as these will need to be drilled first before fitting.

Mark out screw holes for drilling

Drilling into plastic is less of a headache than cutting it and can be easily achieved with a small drill bit. Drilling or cutting plastic can leave a hard residue/ridge around each cut likely due to the plastic ‘fusing’ from friction. This can be easily chipped off with a long finger nail.

Clean off plastic ridges around holes

Right.  I think that covers all the fiddly parts. Before anything else can be done, the door frame needs to be primed and painted so I’ll return to door assembly later on after I’ve tarted up my frame.