Saturday

I alternated between stripping and building the stile.

The safe paint stripper seems to work well if I leave it on for about two hours.

Over Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday I would estimate that I applied the stripper and scraped back the paint about five times.

Most of the layers are, of course, on the external sill and the lower part of each of the stiles.

The internal surfaces appear to only have 2 or 3 layers.

By the end of Sunday I have two layers of paint to remove still.

At the same time I was working on constructing the stile.

What has happened here, is that the window that I deconstructed, has always had a modified stile on the RHS.

It looks like it was originally installed as part of a corner assembly.

I needed to rebuild this stile completely - I had intended to add a piece on to it but I discovered that the original was too badly bowed to be used.

I brought home, from site, two very nice pieces of fully dressed jarrah.

I reduced these down to 40 mm on the planer and then used my biscuit cutter for the first time.

Joining the timbers involved a lot of biscuit cutting, inserting biscuits, gluing and clamping.

The next morning, the results were very good.

Sunday

We did not go to the cinema as we usually do so I had an unexpected bonus day to continue paint stripping and working on the stile.

I put the joined timber through the table saw to reduce it to its correct dimensions and then traced the shape of one of the good stiles on to it.

I cut all the shapes in to it using a small hand saw and routed in the parting bead groove using a small hand held router.

I ended up with a very good fit and I am quite proud of the results.

This augers well for the work I intend to perform on the front door frame soon.