Making Interior Pine Doors - Part 5: the glue-ups

This is Part 5 of a series that starts here

Now that the parts of the doors are ready for gluing up there are a couple things to do first.  

Because the tops of the doors will have plexiglass panels as "windows" I need to take off one side of the groove I made.  This will allow the window to sit in from one side.  I don't want to glue the plexi window in the door just in case it gets broken sometime and trapped in there.  So I will take off half of the wood and then put the plexi in and fill in around the edges with small wood strips.

Hard to explain, but I want to get to this:

And I'm starting with this:

So I will put the plexi in and trap it like this with the small strips:

To get rid of the extra piece (the one side of the groove) I use my router table.  First I mark the starting and stopping point of the place where the window will sit and then take off the wood with a straight bit in my router.  I use two passes, running my door stiles and rails along a fence and taking off the wood just where the openings will be.

 * If there is anything you don't understand, please don't hesitate to ask me for clarification.  Some of these steps are hard to explain in writing *

The other thing I need to do is to finish my panel pieces. Because they are solid wood, they will be expanding and shrinking with the seasons and therefore need to be coated independently of the doors. As I said previously I would not use these 3" pieces again for this application.  A piece of plywood would be much easier, plus it does not change size and could therefore be glued into the doors.  I put five coats of wipe-on polyurethane on all these darn pieces.

The first glue up is gluing one side only, so the four rails (horizontal pieces) are glued into one side stile (vertical piece):

I do add the other stile as well when I glue up but without glue on that side, this keeps the door aligned well while the glue dries on the one side:

Now that the door is half glued, I have slots for the panel pieces to fit into:

I slide the finished pieces in, one at a time from the unglued end:

Then I can glue the other stile on and pull the door together with clamps:

Here's just one of the four doors drying:

After the glue is dried I run my orbital sander over the door rails and stiles.  When YOU do this, pay attention and do not fall off the edge of the door rail, or you will take off some of the poly that took so long to apply!!!:

Okay we are getting there, next time, gluing the big door and adding hinges...