I have some taller linen doors to make, 56". Im concerned about stability issues with 1 piece HDF doors. Has anyone had good luck with doors of this size?

Jonathan,

We run doors of this size everyday. You can reduce the potential for warping big time by removing some material on the back side. Doors of this size and larger we typically route an 1/8" pocket on the back and have had very few issues.

Thanks Adam. Just .75" plum creek? or something thicker

All of our doors are made using 3/4" material. What we have found works best for us is to route the face panel of the door 5/16" deep and then do an 1/8" on the back. Not every door requires the back route. the smaller the door, the more stable they remain. If a client has some tall/wide doors that we feel will need the back route, we let them decide if we route only the biggest doors, or if they would like all of their doors to match (we do charge for the back route).

Curious on the back route would you use a flip operation for that? Also does the vacuum hold if its almost all routed away from the front?

We originally tried to do the back routes first, then flip the entire sheet and route the fronts and cut to size. This does work, however we found that the center panel "flexed" when routing out the front side. Either the vacuum was pulling the panel down, or the force of the routing bit caused the panel to flex which in turn lead to more sanding on the back end.

We have now switched to doing the back route individually after the doors are face routed and cut to size. We set a "shim" in the routed out face to keep the panel from flexing which gives much better product off the cnc machine and less hand sanding time.

Interesting Adam, Sounds like a good way to do it. We ran some mdf doors lately and they wanted to warp slightly, when i saw your post thought that sounded like a good fix.