The door frame.
The door skeleton. This is covered on both sides with sturdy brown paper.
This is an approximately full-sized door made largely of paper, and mounted in a wooden frame. It can be opened and shut, and ( with a little care ) slammed with a realistic noise. It is intended to be light and manoeuvrable so that it can be quickly erected and removed within the service without undue disruption.
It was simply a light wooden frame with a second frame swinging within it. The inner frame was equipped with a handle at each side and "wrapped" with brown paper. The dimensions are not in any way critical; our outer frame was about 200cm x 90cm. with other parts adjusted to fit. The wood need not be heavy; we chose ours to be as light as possible ( subject to availability in my old wood store ) while strong enough for sufficient rigidity. The resulting door with frame was quite easy for one person to carry - it was rather clumsy, but quite light.
We did not use ordinary hinges, as we found it fairly difficult to mount the door satisfactorily. ( We tried. ) Instead we used the pivot arrangement shown in the diagrams. The pivot rods pass through the top and bottom door members, and into the pivot blocks attached to the frame. This gives a very freely swinging door; it has a fair bit of space at top and bottom, and - obviously - doesn't hinge at the door frame, but it wasn't noticeable. We found it useful to provide the support block so that the door could stand vertically when "closed" without distorting the frame. ( We were happily surprised to find that there was very little distortion when the door was "open", provided that the frame was firmly supported vertically, for which we used string guys. )
The "slam board" serves both as a "door shut" location and as the source of a satisfying slam when the door is firmly closed. ( It also determines which way the door opens, so you could usefully think about that before assembling the frame. ) It should be quite firmly fixed to the frame.
We found that we didn't need a latch to hold the door in position; it was sufficient to fix the frame just slightly off vertical in the obvious direction.
It worked very well. With sensible preparation of guylines ( attached to the ends of the top of the frame ) and anchor points, we could erect or remove the door within a minute.
Click either picture for a separate version.
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The door frame. |
The door skeleton. This is covered on both sides with sturdy brown paper. |
We used this door in at least four of our services :
2009 May