A little help from the woodworkers and carpenters please?

I had one of those 2am eureka moments the other day and hopefully some of you with a bit more knowledge and experience than I will be able to tell me if I'm on the right path.

Pretty much all the door jambs in the house I'm fixing up need some love, most of the hinges have been dowled previously, and a number of them are cracked where the hinges are rebated.

I'm looking to strip the timber back to bare and leave it that way, so I'm hoping that I can fix it in such a way that I can repair the damage, make the doors not pull of their hinges the first time someone closes it a little harder than they should and also hide some of the crappy previous repairs. Easy button would be, make new jambs, however, the timber they're made from is rare as rocking horse E36 M3 these days, so that's pretty much off the table.

Now to my eureka moment, whilst it's a bit of bastardisation, I feel like it'd work and be a pretty good compromise. I'm thinking I could deconstruct the jambs and then rip the piece that the hinges and locks go into in half (or halfish) and then dowel, biscuit or otherwise the two pieces back together, but with the damaged bits in the center. This would leave me with virgin wood either side of the jamb that I can redo the hinge rebates and locks.

Would there be a better way of saving the original jambs? Would my idea be worth it? 

To give an idea as to just how bad some of them are, here's some pictures.

As you can see.... A lovely mess...

I originally thought you were dealing with a stain finish.   Now looking at the pictures... If the finish product is going to be painted then I'd tear those jams out and build completely new ones from new lumber and paint to desired finish.

Edit:   Oops.  I just reread the post.  You want to strip the lumber "back bare".  That poses a problem...   Finding matching wood to make you happy.

Oof.  Normally i pop the casing off, good wood glue in the cracks, and drill/screw the cracks shut where the screws will be hidden when the casing goes back on.  From there repair the unseen under hinge area and use long screws through the jamb into the framing to take the stress of hinges hanging off the jamb

In reply to Purple Frog (Forum Supporter) :

Yeah, going back to bare timber, otherwise it would have been just remake with new stuff.

Because the skirtings, architraves, doors and jambs are all the same stuff, it's going to be hard to sub the jambs out without it being noticable unfortunately

here's one I've started stripping

I would first look for a used building materials place that may have demo'd a building of similar vintage and look for wood you could take to a saw mill and have finished to what you need.  Another option would be to look for wood in your own house you could transplant from an unseen area and replace it with new wood.

The amount of nails I see holding it all together would make me scared to run it through any wood working tools like a planer unless I had a metal detector.

OK I just saw latest photo...

In reply to Patrick (Forum Supporter) :

I may be able to do that on some of the less damaged ones, definitely easier than my idea. Some look to be way past that point though unfortunately. Definitely oof.

In reply to jgrewe :

Fair point, the salvage yards out my way aren't renowned for having much older stuff, but who knows, maybe I'll get lucky. I'll definitely take a look.

I'm a bit weird about trying to keep things that are original to the house in it where possible, but I recognize sometimes things just can't be saved no matter how badly I want to. 

Daeman,   now that is a labor of love!

I was looking at it as a contractor working for you.  And to pay all the labor to try to clean those doors up and repair them, and then put on a finish and install properly.... it would be much more inexpensive to buy new stain-grade door units.  

But, Now I see where you are coming from, and where you are trying to get, and your labor is free, so go for it.  

Scout salvage yards.  I'm thinking if you could strip another frame and it didn't match, you may be able to play with stains to get it close.

Another thought.  I did a house two years ago where we wanted to save the old stained doors.  Their frames were a mess.  We painted the repaired frames like the baseboards, but left the doors stained and varnished.  It turned out looking pretty darn good.

In reply to Purple Frog (Forum Supporter) :

A labour of love, or complete madness, but either way I'll sink the time into it.

Totally understand where you're coming from, and from a contractor standpoint, trying to salvage them would be cost prohibitive. I did some new doors as a love job for my mum recently, if that was a chargeable job it would have had to have been new prehung doors and jambs, cause fixing the mistakes of whoever built it took way more hours than it would have to just replace with new. 

I appreciate that you can see what I'm trying to achieve, I do sometimes wonder if I've gotten in over my head, but I guess it's taken 100+ years to get this bad, may as well just keep sinking the labour in and let the result be my payment. 

I'll definitely have a scout about, it would save alot of headaches for sure.

Don't suppose you'd happen to have pictures of the finished result that you'd be willing to share? There's always more than one way to go about things and sometimes I get the tunnel vision