I'm just finishing off the door project and will have the last few coats of finish on by Sunday. I thought I'd show the process from earlier this week when I finally got around to the scroll detail underneath the window.
To begin, I worked off of the pattern I took from an original door example in the neighbourhood and made a template. I only make a 'half template' so there's no discrepancies between the two sides.
I attached it to the blank, carefully tracing the pattern and then flipped it over to establish the opposite profile.
With the profile nicely traced with some heavy pencil lines I can be begin the sawing. I mentioned I ordered the new bow-saw blades from Tools for Working Wood, so having a nice set of fresh blades made this process pretty straight forward. The coarse blade was used to establish the main shape and then I switched over to my medium blade to get into the tight areas of the scroll.
From here it was time to fair out the saw cuts and that was done with an array of rasps, riflers and files. What ever works right? This shaping took a few hours and then another couple of hours sanding. Admittedly, wood carving is something I don't do alot of so the tight spots on the inside of the scroll were a real challenge.
The saw cuts were there and made the rasp work fairly easy but to get into this tiny little spaces was a little frustrating to say the least. Tiny little pieces of sandpaper wrapped around little pieces of dowel and sanding fids finally brought the oak where I wanted it. I don't have any really good rasps like the Auriou line or the TFWW saw makers rasps but if I ever do a project like this again then I'll definitely pick some up before attempting this kind of work.
In this last shot you can see where the scroll lives in relation to the window sill and with a bit more fine sanding and tweaking I'll call this part done. The panels and window details all have three coats of finish at this point and the top rail assembly as well as the mid-locking rails are all glued up. The only thing left is to take the door upstairs to glue the stiles onto the sides and then add these decorative elements.
Cheers!
