Thailands Wooden Doors That Split.

[richb2004]

I am not a joiner and know very little about wood, but have been wondering about something for some time. I have noticed how all wooden doors and wooden flooring in Thailand seems to contract and separate. This looks pretty bad to me and is quite annoying. I was more than surprised when I saw my once lovely looking doors had gone through this process. Would it not be possible to let the wood weather first before constructing the doors and selling them? I would have though that there must be a way around this problem, but as I say I am not a joiner.

Any thoughts?

[GuestHouse]

The problem is the wood is 'Green', its been chopped down, cut and used without time to dry sufficiently.

[richb2004]

The problem is the wood is 'Green', its been chopped down, cut and used without time to dry sufficiently.

I thought this was a problem that only we were experiencing, until I begun to take notice of wood in Hotels and offices etc. Since I started checking I don't think I have seen a door or wood flooring that wasn't in this condition. Surely if you are right, and I'm not saying you aren’t, someone in the industry in Thailand would have figured it out and stopped doing it.

[qualtrough]

The problem is the wood is 'Green', its been chopped down, cut and used without time to dry sufficiently.

Surely if you are right, and I'm not saying you aren’t, someone in the industry in Thailand would have figured it out and stopped doing it.

How long have you lived here?

[penzman]

If you're looking for a new hobby, just go to any sawmill and try to find one single straight 2X4, hours and hours of fun.

I' ve build 6 lattice fences around the house and selecting straight pieces was a nightmare.

Our doors have also cracked. Putty, sand paper and a coat of paint.

[chownah]

I have been mostly dissapointed with the doors too. Aside from splitting they also sag, especially if you have a one metre wide door. Around here (a small village in the north) when they install a door they automatically put steel angle braces at each of the corners to stop the sag....not very aesthetic. I agree with the general opinion that the vast majority of doors (maybe all) are made from wood that is not adequately dried....but....I don't think that this is the entire problem. Around here the premium wood (teak wood aside) is called mai theng. This is not to be confused with mai deng (red wood) which is considered inferior in that good old growth heartwood mai theng is quite resistent to insects; more so than mai deng. Anyway....mai theng has two drawbacks...it is often very difficult to get a smooth surface because it often has rather fancy grain patterns which can make it very beautiful but almost impossible to plane smooth. The other drawback is that it shrinks and swells considerably with the seasonal change of humidity we get here in the north. A door made from wood that is mostly dry (most good doors are made from wood that is at least partially dry) and installed in the dry season with what you would think was adequate clearance all around will swell so much by mid wet season that it can't be closed once it is opened....the same is true of the wooden window doors or shutters that we have on all the windows of our house. I have had to go back and refit about 50% of the doors and windows because they don't function properly in the wet season. This seasonal shrinking and swelling is a real problem in that if you make doors from totally dry wood it will swell in the wet season and tend to loosen the joints which will become obvious in the next dry season. We have a floor made from mai pradoo which is a high quality and relatively expensive wood that makes a nice rich red colored floor looking alot like rose wood...but not as hard as Brazilian rose wood (which is the REAL rose wood)...anyway this wood was cut into 1 inch planks and stored for about 5 years before we used it in our floor....I know this for a fact because my wife bought this wood herself and stored it herself before we were married. I had a reasonably competent crew of woodworkers install the wood and I had them groove all the length wise edges and install hardwood strips much like a tenon that ran the full lenght of each piece keep it stable vertically. It was tightly fit and nailed....but....after about four years it appears that some cracks are opening up a bit...so far not too bad but time will tell.....I'm kind of surprised but not too surprised because I do understand the mechanism by which this happens.

The mechanism by which this happens: If you start with two totally dry pieces of wood...wood that shrinks and swell considerably with humidity change...and you take these two pieces of wood and join them perfectly with no gap and then you nail them so that they can not move...and you do this in the dry season...then what happens when the humidity goes up and they start to swell is that there is no place for the increased size of the wood to go...so...you think...."great!...I've solved the problem...now its really tight and when it dries out it will go back to its original size so I've got it made"...but...you are wrong. What happens is that when the wood swells and has "no place to go" it increases the pressure between the two pices of wood and this can cause the fibres that make up the wood at the place of contact to crush and loose their structural integrity and ability to hold their shape...and they sort of fall apart. When the dry season comes the wood shrinks back and these damaged fibres are crushed smaller so a gap appears and since the fibres are crushed they can loosen and fall off.....ooops....after many cycles you lose some of the wood at the edges and you start to get gaps.

I read about this when I was researching wood in a library...or was it the internet?...I forget. Anyway this mechanism for the crack happenings is something I have only read about but it seems like I'm seeing it for the first time clearly in my floor.....darn it all to heck anyway......it also looks like some of the boards are cupping too...probably from different rates of absorbing humidity from below and above.....darn it all to heck again..........I think that it would be possible to control these problems for a floor by maintaining constant humidity levels both above and below (aircon all the time all year round) but of course this is not practicle for external doors....but careful design and construction that takes the amount of shrink/swell into account may be possible. This kind of work is on my list of things to do but for the forseeable future I'll have no time for anything but developing my farming system...I'm not going to worry about cracks in the doors for my cow barn. If someone out there wants to start a project to design and build door, windows, and furniture that does not suffer from this problem I'd be interested in hearing about what you're doing and maybe we could share ideas.

Chownah

Edited February 11, 2006 by chownah

[AmeriThai]

Excellent post Chownah. That may be one of the reasons why so much new housing contruction I've seen uses reinforced concrete, metal doors and tile floors.

[zoltannyc]

Regarding your I would try the fix it with putty and after that seal it with polyurethane that does not let humidity to penetrate into the wood, I did this around my dishwasher, the countertop is butcher block style and it’s still going strong…..