Hinge alignment fight with a double door, who's side are you on?

Last Thursday I'm hanging a set of solid core double doors for a client in Maplewood, and the gap on the meeting stile was off by almost a quarter inch on top. I set the hinges with a router jig like I always do, checked with a framing square, everything looked level. But once I got the doors up, the left one sagged like it had a mind of it's own, and my first instinct was to shave the hinge mortise deeper on the bottom leaf. My partner on the job, who's been doing this for 30 years, said I was an idiot and that the jambs were twisted, not the doors. We spent two hours rechecking everything, and turns out he was right, the header had a slight bow from the rough opening that I never caught because I was too focused on the door slabs. So my question is, when you hit a misaligned double door, do you trust your hinge math first or do you tear down the framing before touching hardware? I've seen guys argue both ways on site and I'm curious what the rest of you do when the tape measure says one thing and the level says another.

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ray_patel2724d ago

The header bow thing gets missed more than people admit because we all get tunnel vision on the slabs. What I've started doing is stringing a line across the rough opening before the doors even come off the truck, and if the header reads more than a strong 1/16 out I stop right there and figure out the framing first. Chasing hinge mortises is a losing game when the jamb itself is fighting you, you just end up with a door that closes nice at the bottom and rubs at the top. Takes ten extra minutes with a string and a light behind it and saves you the two hour argument.

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