Brain Teasers

Al Fin posted about brain teasers over at his place. He's got links to all kinds of puzzle sites and IQ test thingies.

Me? I'm still trying to figure out how my long weekend of kicking back and perhaps some fishing turned into hanging doors. I don't like to hang doors. Nobody told me I'd have to hang doors. We haven't had the bi-folds on that closet at the crik-house for 15 years. Nobody told me why it was imperative that we have the doors hung this weekend. I still don't know. But, we did it nonetheless.

If you want a brain teaser, buy the hardware for a pair of bi-fold doors and the four 12" wide hollow core door panels and have at it.

The most important part of setting up this brain teaser is; you must follow the directions exactly.

Instructions say: measure the clear height of the opening. Having some experience (commonly known as "fail") in this department, I measured the height at both jambs. I get 79" at one and 79 1/2" at the other.

Instructions say: cut the door panel height to 1 5/8" less than the clear opening height. Remembering fail kicks in. I know that the top and bottom rails of these hollow core doors are not quite 1 5/8" high. Cutting 1 5/8" from one end of the door will result in a door with a hollow core at one end. So we split the difference and take half from top and bottom.

Dad has a brand new power saw complete with headlight and laser guide. I guess the engineers that engineered the saw figured with the laser, a decent sight line to the blade from the left side of the saw was not necessary. I could see the blade as a began to place the edge of the kerf on the line. In short order as the saw moves away from you, this sight line to the blade is gone. Standing up, I see the wonderful laser line only to realize that it is justified to the wrong face of the blade. So, I stopped the cut and turned that fool thing off. But...I digress.

Instructions say: Place the top and bottom hinges for each pair of door panels about 6" from the top and bottom of the door. Place the center hinge at the "center" (duh). So far so good. hinge locations marked.

Instructions say: position door panels such that there is a 5/16" gap between the faces when installing the hinges. Remembering fail, I knew this was an important dimension. So we put some tapered wedges back to back and adjusted until the faces were zactly 5/16" apart and clamped with a man sized kung fu grip spring clamp. Now we are on a roll. First pair of panels joined with three hinges.

I am not convinced.

I decide we need to test this pair of panels before moving on the the second pair. In opening the panels we find that the hinges bind just short of allowing the door faces to lay out flat. Much head scratching ensues.

The instructions said 5/16" gap. We must have the centerline of the hinge barrel off somehow. What followed was a repositioning of the hinge, redrilling, rescrewing, shifting the hinge centerline this way and that to the same result each time.

By the time we came to the determination that the instructions were wrong, the edge of the doors in the vicinity of the hinges looks like we used a 410 shotgun to tap for the screws. Ah, no worries, nothing a little wood filler won't cure.

I can see the game show host now: " Oh..no, so sorry. 5/16" is not the correct answer. The correct answer was a fat 5/16, also known as 3/8".