Measure Twice

After a bank holiday weekend of fevered GeoCaching, I set aside some time buy myself the tools and materials for a start on the dolls house.

I decided to purchase a cheap PC to put in the garage, this way I could listen to music and look at my reference models of the house as I attempted to build it, saving myself a lot of time. I also decided to plug in my webcam and as a result I’ve knocked togeather a timelapse video, available at the end of the post.

It wasn’t a particularly amazing start mind you, I swung by B&Q and picked up some hardboard (fiberboard) and board pins, my intention being to create one of the dolls house inner walls and see if my design for an interior door would actually work.

I mentioned before I’ve no actual experience with wood, so today consisted of measuring up sections to cut, marking them, re measuring, swearing, re marking, then re measuring until the measurements finally stopped changing on me.
I also hadn’t used my Jigsaw since receiving it for my birthday last year, and I’ve actually never used a jigsaw on a single piece of wood, so perhaps diving right in with the first cut being along the outer wall wasn’t the best idea, but the cut was pretty straight and I left a small amount (maybe a whole millimeter?) to file down and straighten up.

The piece I was cutting would be a rectangle with one door segment cut out of the bottom edge, and one door segment cut out in the middle (no connecting edge). I decided to do the inner door rather than the edge door first, firing up my drill with the largest bit I had (10mm) and gently drilling through the location of the door. I then used the Jigsaw from this hole to cut curves from the hole until the blade cut along the one edge of the door, then repeat for another edge, cutting up to the corners.

On reflection I should have left much more room between the jigsaw blade and the edge of the doorframe, and I should have stopped cutting shy of the corners, as I had a tendancy to overshoot with the teeth of the blade and nick a 1mm block out of the door frames corners. I would have been much better to finish these areas off with a file rather than ruin them with the jigsaw.

Once both doorways were door I filed down the rough edges as best I could, but this too produced unexpected results. Hardboard is also known as fiber board because its made out of wood fibers – if you cut, sand or file any section of hardboard you’re likely to pull at the fibers and fray them, which was a recurring theme during my filing.
Also any tool will cut through hardboard like butter, and while I was vigerously filing down an a doorway I lost my grip on the file several times, each one causing the edge of the file to scrape a little bit out of another edge.

Finally I cut a single door out using my newly acquired knowedge – making out the door itself, then cutting around the edges slightly larger than the outline, and using the file to reduce the edges of the door down the marked sizes. I actually had to back to the doorways and file more down on those because the door, although the right size, was too big for the inaccurately cut doorways.

Finally I get the door and the doorway togeather – there are two potential solutions to the problem of attaching interior doors:

1. Nailing

One option is to nail the pins into the hardboard and then cut the pin legs off on the other side.
My attempt at this wasn’t too great, as the back of the hardboard was pushed out, freyed and cracked by the pin tip coming through. It really ruined the hardboard, although the pins themselves were secure.

2. Drilling

My second attempt was to drill a series of holes where the pins would sit, and then to place the pins in them. I figure this would have a similar effect as straight nailing them in, as when the pin ends are cut down there won’t be much of the pins body left to grip the hardboard.
This worked, but the back of the hardboard was still pushed out when drilled. The pins offered little to no friction on the hardboard, so I decided to try adding some wood glue between the pins and hinge, to keep them in place.

Despite the lack of friction provided by the drilling method, it did ensure the pins entered the wood at a much straighter angle then when hammered. Providing the wood glue holds up I’ll be using this method in future, and instead of drilling directly through the hardboard I’ll place a harder wood behind it and drill through into that, stopping the hardboard from tareing or fraying.

I’m also fairly sure the issue of fraying when the hardboard is filed at the edges can be cleared up by using a fine-grain sand paper and some wood glue, but I’ll have to try that once I’ve got some paper.

The only other issue I have is with measuring up each item to be cut – it takes a long time and my measurements are questionable. It might be worth printing off outlines of the items to be cut, merging the prints into a big sheet and then using those outlines, taped to the wood to be cut.

Still, I leave you with the timelapse video of the days events. Enjoy !

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