Review on Irwin Tools Wooden Installation 3111001 by Steve Quinn

I have never hung a door before and I have hung five flat doors with this kit. After five doors the kit was pretty much ready to throw away, but I got more than it was worth for the money. As with everything else, you get better with every door you hang. Maybe a more professional (and expensive) kit will save you some mistakes, but if you're careful you can hang the door and no one will tell you're inexperienced. I'll go through it piece by piece, trying to explain what mistakes to avoid and why one set won't stop you from making a mistake. I hope that with this information you make fewer mistakes than I do, or at least make different mistakes. Small Hole Saw: This was the worst thing about this set - due to poor workmanship, metal plates were left preventing proper assembly. I had to scratch the skin to make it fit at all, but then it wobbled quite noticeably. Turns out it didn't matter much since the hole he cut was pretty round. It was invisible anyway so it didn't matter and it was never bad enough to damage the door. It was a bit frustrating holding a drill that rocked worse than the Weeble®. Large Hole Saw: These went together much better than the small hole saw, but the drill bit was very tedious and required a lot of effort to get it working as a pilot hole. A slight wobble moved the plastic gauge but if you move slowly at first make sure you are centered and don't expect the plastic guide to do too much for you, you could end up with a round hole on the right side . place and right. Be careful. Cut the hole a few times as it touches the door to make sure you're still centered and not skewed. Don't expect it to force your tools into the right positions and angles - this is a guide that will help, but doesn't stop your tool from cutting in the wrong place. When using this attachment you need to hold the drill firmly, the attachment does not do this for you. The biggest problem I had with using the template/guide was the latch hole and the positioning of the mortise locks. At such a small size (1.5 inches), a small misalignment equals a large error. The tensioner has two spring loaded plastic guides to align the latch hole in the center of the door edge. These plastic "feathers" don't press exactly on the middle of the edge. You can easily miss 1/16th of an inch, and that means a big error from center. Even if you mark the center to minimize this error, it's difficult to get the screws into the rim without the mount loosening a bit. This is where the system needs more reinforcement (Irwin, if you're reading this...). With a large hole, it would be nice if the bracket were thicker, but small mistakes in the placement of the large hole don't matter as the doorknob frame will hide it. the best part of this whole set. The little router worked incredibly well with the latch slot template, and gouging out the rest of the wood from the latch slot was trivial. In this area I encountered two problems. First, the template's pin holes are the same holes left over from the master hole template when it was installed. That's handy, but as I mentioned above, the springy, unreliable nature of edge positioning makes it all too easy to get positioning a little wrong. So it's all too easy to get the jig's position wrong and difficult to fix since the holes in the wood are so close to where you might want to make new holes (for better alignment). Buy some good wooden toothpicks and glue or some small dowels. Another problem with the plunge jig is that when using a drill as a router, it is easy to knock off the depth of the drill. This only happened once but I broke the bit depth and compromised my template. I could keep using it but be careful to always press down on the bit and not loosen it from the template guide. Mortise Hinge Template: The mortice hinge template worked a lot better than I thought it would. It definitely takes some skill and I can guarantee you'll get better with each loop of insertion. But you will also make new mistakes with every puncture. One tip is to make sure you're fastening the door to something solid behind where you're going to be pounding. Also cut out the outline of the loop with a utility knife. Finally, remember that higher quality solid core doors behave quite differently than hollow core doors - I've found that the wood on the edges of solid core doors is simply stronger. The texture of the wood also prevents clean cuts and chiseling on heavier doors. Be patient with heavier doors - do the contour cuts as best you can before using the chisels. However, if you hang higher-quality doors, then you should seriously consider a different approach to the mortise tape. I wish I had a router and a router template for making the buttonhole. The bit approach is too error prone and labor intensive. I would like Irwin to make a buttonhole template that will allow using the included cutter. As mentioned above the latch cutter and template was the absolute best part of this kit, it would be nice if the same (or similar) cutter could be used to cut the hinge. (I suspect the depth of the hinge groove is less than the depth of the bolt groove, so this would require a different bit, but I definitely think it's worth paying for compared to the 19th century chisel approach).