2nd Smashed Door

What’s under the boards?

Since I found a place to repair smashed doors, I get confident and remove the 2nd door in the cottage. This is the door on the original bedroom I restored last year. I did the entire room except for the door and molding. I knew that something was up with the door because they had put plywood panels on the door.

So repeating the process from the 1st door, I heat the paint off the hinges and remove the door. I then remove the plywood panels to see what’s underneath. Same problem as the other door with smashed out panels and lots of split wood. I can only imagine what people were doing with these doors.

Here’s the damage.

I move forward with stripping the paint from the door following the same process as the other door. First I make a pass with the SpeedHeater to soften up the paint and scrape that off. After I get most of that off, I apply a layer of CitriStrip and cover with plastic wrap to let that sit for a few hours. While I let that soak, I then get a crockpot going to boil the hardware and locks from the doors.

Stripping the door.

For the hardware, it looks like it’s cast iron and the locks are surface mounted rim locks. The rim locks look like they have a few layers of black paint and some white paint slopped on from painting the door. The door knobs are also painted black and look like they are porcelain.

Starting condition of the lock and doorknob. Covered in black paint along with some white from the door.

I put everything in the CrockPot with some dish detergent and baking soda. I let that simmer for a few hours and start removing the paint. Some of the paint just comes off from wiping, for example the door knobs are porceline so the old paint just falls of that surface after a few hours of heating.

Knobs before and after crockpot treatment.

Doorknob restored back to original white porceline.

Interior of the lock with paint and dirt all caked into it.

The metal parts are a bit trickier. I first disassemble the lock and put each piece in individually. Rim locks are pretty simple with only a few parts, so I should be able to reassemble after cleaning. The current interior is caked with paint and it’s all frozen up so the mechanism no longer works. They take a few passes of heating and then some scraping with a wire brush and steel wool. Since the metal is cast iron, there’s lots of little pits that collect old paint so for those I need to use a dental pick to get that final pieces of paint out. I then refer back to my original picture of the lock to reassemble the pieces. I then spray some dry 3-in-1 lock lubricant in the interior and wipe down the exterior with some beeswax to prevent rusting. I think I’ll keep the metal unfinished rather than re-painting with black or some other enamel.

Cleaning the lock pieces.

Restored locks.