A Door On the Wall

Build Series #10

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So, I had this shed.

It was a good shed, filled with shelves stocked with home-canned and home-cured food, and spare car parts that fit the existing vehicle fleet.

Problem was, I’d built it in a place where a swinging door wasn’t practical. I needed a sliding door. Should be cheap, right? Yeah, hinges are already cheap, but a couple roller-blade wheels and a c-channel track couldn’t be all that expensive, could they?

Well…

I think my wallet just had a seizure.

Maybe, I thought, this wasn’t such a good idea.

But, looking around the site here, I discovered I had some Unistrut channel and a bunch of scrap metal, so I figured “why not build my own?”

I chronicled the first stage of the build in August. You can catch up here:

Trolley Problems

But if you’re just wanting a quick recap, here’s the TL;DR:

I made some tracks and suspension trolleys out of scrap metal, Unistrut, and some inexpensive sealed bearings. They rolled well, and I had great hope for the future.

Not long after that, the entire build got derailed by a pair of simultaneous layoffs and the attendant scramble for clients (which is still going on—click here to read about how this freelancer’s lance is up for grabs).

But there was food in the shed, and a bear on the prowl, and the door had to be built lest I wound up doing another crazy naked dawn-time dance chasing the Yogi away from my winter stores.

Building the Door

Your normal front-of-house door is usually around thirty-six inches wide. For my shed, I had to cover a seven-and-a-half foot hole in the wall (yes, I made it that big on purpose in case I ever wanted to convert it to a dirt-bike garage).

That’s a lot of door. You can’t buy that shit off the shelf. You gotta build it.

So, after a brief dicker with the local lumberyard, I got a truck full of supplies.

The door itself came together across a pair of saw horses. 1/2” plywood went down first—two pieces side-by-side. Then, using screws and wood glue, built a frame atop them using 2x4 and scraps—4 2x4s around the outside, and one 2x4 laid on its side down the middle to tie the two panels together, and scraps on the corners as diagonal gussets, to provide stability.

If you think way back to your elementary geometry (or to your medieval history or 7th grade physics, if you went to a decent school), you’ll remember that squares are pretty crap at holding their shape. The corners are stress risers where shear forces concentrate. Put a square window in an airplane, the window will explode. Round off the corners on that same window, it will keep the air in, no trouble.

In structural engineering, curves are pretty good (the arch is an amazing thing) but triangles are both stronger and easier to build. By putting gussets in at the corners of this door, I turned every square corner into a triangle, adding the kind of strength and stability you need if you’re a door hoping to resist the yanking of a hungry bear.

Overbuilt? Probably. It weighed as much as a small elephant and was a hell of a lot harder to move into place.

Fortunately, you can roll square things.

Now that it was in its new home, all I had to do was hang the track and bolt the trolleys on. Easy peasy. So the next day…

…I got a call from a client with an urgent job.

And then I got a call offering me a winter’s worth of free firewood—if I took a couple weeks to chop up an insanely large tree.

And then the truck broke down.

And then there was a family emergency I had to see to…

And so on.

I finally got back to working on the shed door after the early winter rolled in and annoyed the hell out of me.

Annoyed me?

Well, I’ve been on site a few years now, and I’m not quite as dumb as I look. I’ve figured out how to do winter prep and spring prep, and this year I was aiming to get both done before winter started so I could have a nice long writing season. Maybe even finish three or four books that are all sitting half-done on my hard drive.

That’s me. The dreamer of impossible dreams.

But hey, if I wasn’t, I would still be stuck in the suburbs instead of having the problems I do—and I like those problems.

You think I’m kidding? Ha! Never underestimate the value of having the problems you want to have.

So, anyway, sometime after the scandalously early date when the snow started piling up, after the bear started hibernating, and around the time the snow load on the driveway built up to the point that I couldn’t avoid doing on-site work unless I wanted to hike a mile out to the main road where I’d parked my car, I started looking at the shed again. Possibilities and plans began to hatch in my head, most of them boiling down to something like:

“Maybe I should just go ahead and hang the damn door.”

Bracketing The Issue

To hang the track, I was going to need some brackets.

This took a bit of figuring—I had to decide how far out from the wall I wanted the door to hang, then cantilever the track out to the right distance from the wall that the door’s inner edge would clear that distance.

Once I figured that out, I’d know the dimensions the brackets should be.

I sketched and figured, and decided that, all things being equal, I wanted the door to fit snugly up against the wall. I made up plans with final dimensions and got to work building the brackets.

No, you can’t see the plans; they’d be unintelligible to anyone at this point. I used them to start a fire before I could photograph them. It wasn’t an accident. It was revenge on the stupid part of me that made those plans because it forgot to account for one incredibly important thing. But we’ll get to that.

For materials, I chose a length of old bed frame. Bed frames are made from high-carbon steel (the same kind of stuff you might use to make tools or knives)—it has to be to keep its shape in the face of all the bouncing that gets done on top of it.¹

The notches cut out of each were to make them easier to bend at the correct point.

Once I had those pieces cut, they went into the forge for a bit of the old blast-and-spank hammer game (sorry, I’ve been re-reading A Clockwork Orange and it’s obviously affected your humble narrator). I flattened them out, then bent them to shape.

Initially, I had fantasies about drifting all the bolt holes for mounting the brackets, as well as the holes for the gussets. Alas, the attempt demonstrated that either the idea was stupid or I am nowhere near that good a blacksmith yet (or, more likely, both). In the end, I decided to make the safe move and weld up the gusset while drilling the bolt holes with the drill press, then I heat-treated them (including tempering) to increase their stiffness and toughness.

Not pretty, but functional.

And this is the part of the story where your ostensibly honorable hero reveals the cowardice in his craven heart:

The ambient temperature when I did this work was about 25 degrees in the sun. To actually get these brackets to accept paint (an essential ingredient if you want to avoid the crunchy goodness of rust-induced structural failure) I’d have had to take them into the living room.

My partner-in-homesteading has…opinions…about spray paint in the living room. Most of those opinions are too obscene to publish verbatim without fear of Stripe terminating my account, which would wreck my ability to earn an income from my writing here on Substack and deprive the homestead of its food budget.

In the interest of living a quiet life that lasts longer than the next time she cooks dinner, I decided to put the brackets up unfinished, then paint them in the spring.

So, with a little help from a ladder, a level, and a couple of drills, I got the track mounted.

Now all I had to do was bolt the trolleys to the door and roll the door onto the…

Oh hell.

The trolleys were L-shaped. The weight hanging off them would be asymmetrical, making the trolleys twist in the track and bind up.

Good thing I thought to test the trolleys in the track before I hung the door on them.

Back to the welding bench to add symmetrical feet on the backside of the trolleys!

You know, looking at these images now, I can’t believe I didn’t see what was wrong with them. I was deep into end-of-project tunnel vision—that curious inability to notice problems—or, indeed, make sound judgments—that sometimes kicks in when you’re just one step away from being done.

Can you spot the problem I’ve just set myself up for?

Well, I sure didn’t.

It all seemed to be going well...

I got my feet welded on, got my trolleys mounted on the door, slid the door onto the track, and…

Bam go the bearings.

One of the bearings shattered.

So, for those of you who looked at the weld-up photo above and thought “Wow, that’s a lot of heat to be putting into those bearings!”, you deserve a gold star.

In-situ bearing replacement—using a c-clamp as a screw press—got the little bastards rolling again.

So, another attempt at sliding them onto the track and…they wouldn’t slide. The door completely bound up in the track.

Upon inspection, I discovered that the track wasn’t mounted exactly straight—it had minor bowing in two directions that was making the trolleys bind up. So, I spent another fifteen minutes tweaking the mounts, and I got the thing more-or-less straight, slid the door on, and…

It’s still not exactly right, but it’s good enough for now. Especially since, once mounted, my greatest folly was revealed:

Look at that clearance! I made exactly the right calculation for where to hang that track…

If I wanted the shed to forever look like a ramshackle pressboard affair from the ass-end of Hickville. Alas, I—yes, even I—have standards. I insist that my sheds look like they come from the front end of Hickville. To gussy this bastard up, it’s gonna need siding.

Board-and-batten siding that has an aggregate thickness of just under an inch.

And that, my friends, is why I burned the plans for those brackets in disgust.

Because this build only shapes up to “good enough,” not “done.”

Dammit.

But at least it is good enough. And it does mean that I will be re-hanging that track, so I don’t have to screw with it any more right now.

Once I get the latch and handle forged (watch this space!), this door will keep the bear at bay—and, in the end, that is the most important part. Since the rest of the site won’t look really nice until several more buildings are done, I can afford to leave the brackets as they are.

For now.

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1. By kids who jump on the bed because they don’t have a trampoline, you perv. Why in the hell did you think I meant anything else? It’s not like I’m the kind of guy who talks publicly about sex or anything.