Door Cladding

A small job that I completed a few days ago was the insulation and cladding of the side door.

The insulation in Jim is pretty weak generally; there are cold bridges everywhere and the fibreglass insulation that the original coachbuilder fitted between the inner and outer skins has sagged to the bottom of the walls. Nevertheless, the 18mm plywood/GRP doors are an obvious weak point as far the insulation goes. I am pretty much resigned to having to run the heating continuously in cold weather, but there is no point passing opportunities to improve the insulation where I can, and so I decided to add 50mm of Celotex to the doors to make them less likely to leak heat.

I started by battening out the side door to 50mm, to hold the insulation in place and hide the edges of the insulation board. This part took the longest as I had to box around the window, door handle, and night latch, and cut recesses for the three lock bolts, and the mechanism tube. I held the 50mm strips of plywood in place using angle brackets screwed into the door, and more Sikaflex 221.

With the door boxed out to a depth of 50mm, I fitted a quadrant trim around all edges.
As with all the trim I am fitting, the profile I used is Teak, and has been pre-varnished with three coats of satin yacht varnish. I fix the trim pieces using blue evo-stik PVA and 0.6mm headless pins; the pins don't provide much strength but they are very effective at holding the trim in place whilst the glue sets, and they are practically invisible to anyone except avid carpentry enthusiasts.

With the trim installed, I cut a piece of insulation to size and pushed it into place. I didn't allow any clearance space between the insulation and the facing board, and I found that the angle brackets prevented the insulation from sitting flush in the frame I had boxed out. After much coercing, I ended up pulling the insulation out and cutting small recesses for each bracket.

The final job was to cut a piece of plywood to cover the insulation and face the inside of the door. I managed to get the piece pretty much correct on the first try using the well tested hardboard template technique, although I didn't brace the template enough and so it sagged enough to mean that I had to trim the the final piece a little.

Another small job completed. All that is left is to seal the top edge with silicone (as it will be exposed to the rain when the door is open) and cut a small piece of stainless to finish the recess behind the door handle. In hindsight it would have been a good idea to make the facing panel removable, in case the locking mechanism breaks, but it's too late for that now.