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What happens between the yard and your doorway
Fourteen sets of hands touch a carved door before it leaves us. This page is the honest version of what each of them does, in order.
Stage one
Timber comes in green and waits
Boards arrive from licensed Peninsular mills as sawn stock, usually at eighteen to twenty-five per cent moisture. They are graded on the apron, stacked with stickers so air moves through every layer, and left to settle before anything goes near a kiln.
Our kilns run slow schedules. Rushing a chamber is how you get case hardening - a board dry on the outside, wet in the middle, that splits open the first time it is ripped. We dry to ten to twelve per cent, then the pack rests in the mill for at least a week so the moisture equalises through the thickness.
Every intake is logged against its delivery documentation, so chain of custody paperwork for an export order is a matter of pulling a file, not reconstructing a history.
Stage two
Machining, where the tolerances live
This is the least romantic part of the mill and the part that decides whether your door still closes properly in five years.
Ripping and thicknessing
Boards are ripped oversize, left overnight to see whether they move, then straightened and thicknessed. Anything that has cupped or bowed comes out here rather than showing up in a finished leaf.
Jointing
Mortice and tenon on solid stile-and-rail work, glued with a D4-rated adhesive and pinned on entrance sizes. Engineered cores are pressed in a heated press with balanced faces so the leaf has no reason to twist.
Profiling and routing
Panel profiles, groove work and routed faces are cut on set tooling, so a set of ten doors is genuinely identical rather than approximately so.
Hardware machining
Hinge, lock and flush-pull positions are routed to the manufacturer template at the mill. Nobody should be cutting a mortice on your site with a chisel and a hope.
Stage three
The hand work no machine has replaced
Carving is still done entirely by hand. Our senior carvers have worked the same motif library for twenty years and can pick up a half-finished panel from a colleague without a visible change in the cut. We keep rubbings of about forty patterns and draw new ones from a client sketch or a photograph of a family door.
Edge work, final fitting of glazing beads and the last pass of sanding are also hand operations. Every leaf is sanded through three grits after machining, because a routed shoulder full of fuzz will drink finish unevenly and show it forever.
Security leaves and pivot doors are hung on a test jig at the mill and swung a hundred times before they are taken down and crated. If a lock is going to bind, it should bind here.
Stage four
Finishing, and the checks before crating
Whatever finish you chose, the last hour in the mill is a checklist rather than a formality.
Moisture re-checked on the finished leaf. Anything outside ten to twelve per cent goes back to the rest area rather than onto the lorry.
Leaf laid on a flat table and measured for wind across both diagonals. A twist you can see is a twist the client will see.
All six faces sealed, including the top edge, unless you specifically asked for the leaf raw for site finishing.
Wrapped, corner-protected, numbered against the drawing and loaded in hanging order so the site crew works from the front of the crate.
The mill in numbers
Capacity, honestly stated
- Kiln chambers
- Six, running slow schedules to 10-12 per cent moisture
- Daily output
- Around 120 finished leaves plus matching frame sets
- Carvers on the bench
- Five, with a combined seventy years of relief work
- Pressure treatment
- One vessel, used on all ground-floor and external frame stock
- Site radius for our own crews
- Penang and Kedah; supply-only with fitting sheets beyond
- Timber sourcing
- Licensed Peninsular Malaysian mills, documented per intake
Tell us what the opening looks like
Send a photograph, a sketch on the back of an envelope or a full architectural set. You will get a costed shop drawing back, not a brochure.