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Last week Mrs. Lose was moving a bunch of files and other stuff around in the garage and managed to knock one of the raised panels out of the bottom panel on the one garage door. I got some estimates on replacing the doors and I also tried to contact the original builders of the doors to see if they could build a replacement bottom section. Replacing the garage doors now days with even the aluminum or fiberglass or steel doors was very expensive. The outfit that built the doors originally is no longer in business. I didn’t want to have to trash the 2 doors and spend the money on replacements so here’s what I came up with. The cutters they used were pretty big and were made to use in a shaper instead of a router table like mine. I used to build raised panel cabinet doors so I dug through my router cutter stash and came up with one that was kind of similar but about 1/2’ smaller across diagonally. So what I did was cut a panel exactly the size of the opening not including the slot around the frame that the panel tongue fit in. I used 3/8” Baltic birch plywood for the interior panel that the outer panel would mount to. Matching the color was another challenge but digging through some old cans of stain I came up with something pretty close. I sprayed the new panel with a couple of coats or polyurethane exterior finish and put it all together. Once the sun shines on the door a bit and it gets dusty like th rest of the door it’ll look pretty close. If you look at it closely you can see the difference in the raised panels because of the different sized cutters used.