Shorten hollow bifold closet doors

Hi there -

I have seen a lot of posts related to trimming hollow closet doors, but I can't seem to figure out how I will trim my bifold closet doors. The problem is when I remove the excess on the bottom, I will remove the 1/4" piece of wood that the bottom pin goes in. Any advice is appreciated.

Tom

 

It depends how much you are trimming off. The piece of wood that has the hole in it is usually about 1 1/4" wide. So if you are cutting off 2", you will be totally cutting that piece off. What you would do is shave the veneer off the sides of it, clean it up, and glue it back into the bottom of your hollow core door. I've found that once you glue it up, it works well to sandwich the area being clamped with two 1x2's, then clamp the 1x2's tight to the door. This distributes the force of clamping evenly across the entire door bottom. Let that set up for a few hours to allow the glue to completely dry before you take the clamps off.

If you're only cutting 1/4" off of the door, you would not have removed enough material to make a significant difference in how the pivot pins work.