Plywood Doors for Dummies, Take 2

door made of plywood

No matter how clueless they might have been, some of the people eHow.com called "contributors" could always be considered cunning. One of the fun tricks the more sly among them liked to pull was to find multiple similar topics¹ and reuse the same (claimed) data sources to pound out content just different enough from the last time to avoid charges of plagiarism. A while back we caught repeat DotD Owen E. Richason IV doing a lousy job of explaining doors made of plywood. He's back with a second bite of the same apple in "How to Make a Plywood Hinged Door."

We guess the use of the word "hinged" was intended to differentiate the door from a sliding (or perhaps rolling) door. Whatever the case, Richason IV was every bit as clueless the second time around.

On his first pass, we started out by chiding Richason IV for his doofus notion of why one might need a door made of plywood. Owen E. thought you might be "building an outdoor storage shed, closing off an attic for storage or even building a tree house." This time around? Richason IV thought,

"If you are building a tree house or want to enclose an attic or shed, you can make a plywood hinged door."

Last time, he thought the project would be "relatively simple," this time it's just "simple." Oh, and he used the exact same two references — both printed books — only changing the order of the two. We had hoped that, this time, Owen E. had gotten it right...

...But no such luck. Owen made the same basic boo-boos this time out. In fact, he made a pretty serious error right up front: the idiot didn't even include plywood in his "Things You'll Need" list! Just a mention somewhere near the top of "a sheet of pressure-treated plywood..." Why you'd need pressure-treated plywood in your attic, we'll never know. What's more important, however, is the thickness: the yutz specified ½-inch in his other post, he didn't even mention thickness this time.

More to the point, of course, is that Richason IV pounded out the same set of instructions as before, just changing a word or two here or there,  including "Attach 120-grit sandpaper to a sander and sand the piece of plywood to smooth it" — apparently Owen doesn't know plywood's already sanded smooth. It's when it comes to hanging his door, though, that Owen's ignorance really comes through:

"Fasten hinges to the plywood door, placing one several inches from the top and from the bottom, using stainless steel screws and a screw gun..."

Unlike people who know what they're doing, Richason IV never mentioned framing the door with dimensional lumber to stiffen it and provide solid wood that would hold the "stainless-steel screws" he seems to like so much.

That was too easy: our Dumbass of the Day just collected another award for the exact same stupidity as the last time!

¹ eHowians called the topics that the company scraped from search queries "titles."

copyright © 2020-2023 scmrak

DDIY - DOORS