It often happens that in a home workshop it is not possible to have a large range of equipment. But many products can be made not in the traditional way, but using the tools that are available. And if you need to make a door with a decorative grille, but you don’t have a router at hand, then you can get by with a circular saw.
You will need:
- a circular saw,
- pine boards,
- PVA glue,
- sandpaper,
- White paint.
To install the door you need dowels with a diameter of 8 mm, door hinges, a Forstner drill with a diameter of 35 mm and self-tapping screws.
To more accurately adjust the dimensions of the workpieces, it is advisable to use an electric plane and thickness planer.
We will also need a special tenoning carriage and a jig for adding dowels, which are easy to make yourself, also using a circular saw.
Manufacturing process
First we will make the grille itself, and then the frame of the door.
First of all, we cut 25 mm thick pine boards on a circular saw into pieces about 1 meter long and about 10 cm wide.These dimensions are still arbitrary and chosen for the convenience of initial processing.
It is advisable to use already planed boards. Otherwise, we plan them using an electric planer.
And then we cut it into dies on a circular saw. Attention: the thickness of such a workpiece determines the thickness of the future grating.
In this case, we split the boards approximately in half, and the resulting dies, about 12 mm thick, were leveled on a thicknesser to a thickness of 10.3 mm.
We install a special tenoning carriage on the table of the circular saw. Using a caliper to control the overhang of the saw blade, we raise it to a height of 5.2 mm, that is, to a height slightly greater than half the thickness of the workpiece.
A tongue 16 mm wide is fixed at the base of the movable shuttle of the carriage, which determines the width of the bulkheads of the future grille. The length of the tongue is about 80 mm, the height is 5 mm. First, we set the shuttle so that the edge of the tongue is located from the saw blade at a distance of a spacer 25 mm wide. Thus, we set the parameters of the future grille: the width of the bulkheads will be 16 mm, and the size of the empty cells will be 25x25 mm. We move stop B towards the shuttle and fix it with wing nuts. To find the position for stop A, we use a gauge having the width of the tongue reduced by the cutting thickness of the saw blade. We fix stop A.
We move the shuttle close to stop B, rest the workpiece against the tongue and make the first outer cut.
We move the shuttle to stop A, rest the workpiece against the tongue and make the second outer cut.
Then we gradually move the shuttle and select the wood between the outer cuts.
This creates a groove half a tree deep and 16 mm wide.We place the workpiece with a groove on the tongue of the shuttle, and repeating the steps of forming the outer cuts and sampling the wood between them, we make a second groove.
Gradually transferring the workpiece onto the tongue from groove to groove, we process it along its entire length.
We make a sufficient number of such blanks.
We remove the tenoning carriage and use a circular saw to cut the workpieces into lattice elements 16 mm wide.
On the assembly table we draw the boundaries of the lattice with the dimensions we need.
And focusing on these boundaries, we make a set of lattice from sawn planks. Attention: it is necessary to ensure that all elements go beyond the drawn boundaries.
After this, you can connect all the planks using PVA glue. To do this, we sequentially separate one strip at a time, apply a drop of glue to the joints and return the strip to its place.
When the glue dries, use a circular saw to saw off the excess along the specified boundaries.
Now you need to make the door frame. We cut blanks 70x25 mm on a circular saw.
Next, we make a bevel on the outside of the circular so that the door appears visually thinner and select a quarter for the made grille.
Then we saw off the blanks to size at an angle of 45 degrees and connect them with PVA glue and dowels using a homemade jig for adding dowels.
The frame and grille are ready. Now they can be slightly sanded and painted.
Using a Forstner drill, we drill two blind holes in the frame and secure the hinges with self-tapping screws.
Since this particular door closes the technical opening in the bathroom, the grille cannot be firmly fixed into the frame - due to constantly changing humidity, the structure may burst. Therefore, we simply insert the grate into the selected quarter and secure it with crackers.
We mount the door into the opening. The work is finished.
Conclusion
In a similar way, you can make grilles for decorating heating radiators, ventilation and other openings, for gazebos, etc.
