Jeff and Jon from TodaysCraftsmen shared the woodworking tip featured in this video.
For this episode of their “On The Road” series, Jeff and Jon stop by True Trade Carpentry to spend the day with Tim Beardsley, a craftsman who has built a reputation for historic and custom door work. The shop specializes in arched-top doors, period-accurate windows, and millwork that most shops either can’t or won’t attempt anymore. Tim walks through his process from raw lumber to finished installation, offering a rare look at how a modern shop balances old-world joinery with new technology.
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Meet Tim Beardsley and True Trade Carpentry
Tim has spent years building a shop dedicated almost entirely to custom doors, historic reproductions, and nontraditional millwork. His team takes on projects that would make most shops nervous, including recreating ornate brownstone doors complete with raised panels and period moldings. Clients send reference photos of damaged or missing originals, and the shop rebuilds them to match exactly.
Much of the work comes from historic homes in and around major cities, though Tim notes the business has expanded well beyond its original base. Jobs now stretch into surrounding states, and the shop even has work installed near the nation’s capital. The common thread through all of it is a commitment to traditional joinery paired with the efficiency needed to keep a small shop profitable.
Building a Stable Door Core
Rather than building doors from solid slabs, Tim’s shop constructs cores from stacked and glued pine, which is then surfaced before being veneered. This cross-grain lamination keeps the core dimensionally stable, preventing the warping and splitting that plagues doors built from a single piece of wood.
The veneer itself is kept thin enough that it behaves like a skin rather than a structural layer. If the veneer gets too thick, it starts moving like solid wood again, which defeats the purpose of veneering in the first place. Keeping it thin also allows the shop to resaw and book-match the veneer from a single board, so the grain and color flow seamlessly across a door or an entire run of cabinetry.
It’s a subtle detail most clients would never notice unless it was done wrong. A mismatched veneer with uneven color or grain direction immediately draws the eye, while a properly matched panel disappears into the design.
A Massive Custom Pivot Door
One of the standout projects in the shop is an oversized pivot door built for a home just across the state line. The core for this door uses a different approach than standard interior work, combining pine with a water-resistant engineered panel product on the exterior faces before the show veneers go on.
Because of its size, the door is assembled in multiple glue-up stages rather than all at once, allowing the shop to monitor each section for movement before committing to the next step. Hardware for a door this heavy isn’t an afterthought either, since a single pivot hinge capable of supporting several hundred pounds represents a significant investment on its own.
Projects like this highlight why historic door work is as much about engineering as it is about aesthetics. A door this size has to function flawlessly every day for decades, which means every material choice has to account for weight, moisture, and long-term stability.
CNC Technology in a Traditional Shop
Despite being steeped in traditional joinery, Tim’s shop leans heavily on CNC technology for fixtures, templates, and decorative profiles. Drawings are converted directly into cut files, which removes the guesswork that used to come with hand-fit templates and bent lamination forms.
Door heads with curved tops are a good example of how this technology pays off. The curved blank is cut on the CNC, the layers are laminated and stacked, and the final profile is run on the same files used to cut the matching door panels. That means the curve of the head and the curve of the panels underneath it are guaranteed to align, something that would have taken hours of careful bent lamination work in the past.
Tim is candid about the fact that embracing this technology wasn’t optional if the shop wanted to stay competitive. It also makes training newer employees easier, since a cut part is either right or it isn’t, with no ambiguity from a mismeasured template.
Key Machines That Keep the Shop Running
Beyond the CNC, several other machines play a major role in daily production. A large jointer handles flattening the stock before it goes to the planer, and a wide-belt sander, picked up more recently, has become one of the most valuable additions in the shop. What used to take hours of hand sanding with a belt sander now takes a matter of minutes, freeing up skilled hands for other tasks.
A dust collector acquired through an auction now powers every machine in the shop, dramatically improving air quality during heavy shaping and sanding operations. Older iron also has a home here, including a vintage shaper rescued from a warehouse cleanout that still has its original grinding attachment intact.
A standout tool for profile work is a molding machine that allows the shop to cut custom knives for historic profiles that simply aren’t available from any catalog. Old molding samples can be scanned or sliced and sent off to have matching knives ground, giving the shop the ability to recreate virtually any historic profile a client might need.
Matching Historic Profiles and Custom Millwork
A recurring theme throughout the shop tour is matching existing historic details rather than replacing them outright. When window or door profiles from older homes aren’t available anywhere, the shop can trace, scan, or sample the original to produce knives that recreate it exactly.
This library of custom-ground knives grows with every unusual job, meaning previously cut profiles can often be pulled and reused on future projects without starting from scratch. It also allows the shop to take an existing straight profile and adapt it into a curved version for an arched opening, something off-the-shelf millwork simply can’t do.
Tim emphasizes that preserving original trim whenever possible is often better than replacing it. Removing ornate historic casing can damage surrounding plaster and walls, so the shop tries to cut in new framing at the smallest possible point and patch a small matching section rather than tearing out intact original work.
Finishing with Marine-Grade Products
For finishing, the shop relies on spray-applied marine finishes rather than traditional interior topcoats. A gloss base coat is always applied first regardless of the final sheen desired, since it provides the buildup and depth the finish needs. A satin topcoat is then added for a more natural look.
Multiple coats of the gloss base are sprayed and allowed to cure before a final light sanding and the application of the top coat. This layered approach fills small imperfections and produces a finish that looks rich without appearing overly built up or plasticky.
Spraying also makes the process far more efficient than brushing, allowing several doors to be finished in the time it would take to brush and roll just one. For shops or individuals without spray equipment, the same finishes can still be rolled and brushed, though it takes considerably longer.
Installation Realities and Craftsmanship Under Pressure
Installing doors in century-old homes comes with its own set of challenges, since very little in these structures is actually square or plumb. Tim’s team often builds doors slightly undersized so they can be shimmed and adjusted to fit openings that have shifted over decades.
Oscillating multi-tools get heavy use on install day, especially when cutting into old, thick door frames that need to be notched or removed. Patience is treated as the most important tool in the kit, since a mistake on an installed door isn’t a quick fix like adjusting a cabinet hinge.
Full installs often stretch into twelve or fourteen hour days, especially on jobs involving multiple trades working in sequence. A complex door can take five to six weeks to complete once every gluing, resting, and veneering step is accounted for, and that timeline has to be planned around a fixed install date, often before final field measurements are even possible.
Reflecting on the Craft
What stands out most from the shop tour is how deliberately Tim has blended traditional door-building methods with modern efficiency. Nothing about the process feels rushed or shortcut, yet technology is used wherever it genuinely improves accuracy or speed without compromising the final product.
Tim’s advice for anyone wanting to get into this type of work is simple: slow down and take the time to do it right. Historic door and window work leaves little room for error, and the shops that succeed in this niche are the ones willing to put in the extra care it demands.
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Matt’s Take
These are my personal thoughts and tips based on my own experience in the shop. This section is not written, reviewed, or endorsed by the original creator of this project.
What really jumps out to me here is the veneer core work. Stacking and gluing pine into a stable substrate before veneering is a smart move for any door or panel that needs to stay flat over decades, not just historic reproductions. If you’re experimenting with this at home, pay attention to grain direction in each layer and let glue-ups cure fully before surfacing. Rushing that step is usually where warping problems start.
The CNC discussion is worth sitting with too. A lot of woodworkers assume CNC work takes away from the “handmade” feel of a piece, but in cases like curved door heads, it actually guarantees the kind of precision that’s nearly impossible to hand-fit consistently. I’d encourage anyone on the fence about adding a CNC to their shop to think of it as a tool for repeatability, not a replacement for traditional joinery skills.
On the finishing side, marine-grade spray finishes are a great call for anything exposed to weather or heavy daily use. If you don’t have spray equipment, you can still get solid results brushing or rolling, just budget more time and thin your coats slightly to avoid brush marks.
Lastly, a safety note: any shop running a wide-belt sander, shaper, or molding machine needs solid dust collection and hearing protection. Fine dust from sanding and shaping operations adds up fast, and it’s one of those things that’s much easier to manage early than to fix later.