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Today I'm going to show you how I install one of the
most fundamental pieces of hardware, a butt hinge.
Heh, butt.
(groovy brass music)
Here are the tools that I use to get the job done.
A marking gauge, a chisel, an adjustable square,
an X-ACTO knife and a router with a small straight bit.
The router is actually optional here.
You can really just use your chisel to take out
all the stock and fine tune the fit of the hinge,
but the router really will speed things up and once you have
that depth set it gives you a nice consistent depth from
hinge to hinge and those make the job go quite a bit faster.
You'll notice I'm working on one of the case sides
here first. It's going to be a lot harder to put
these mortises in these locations once there's
a top and a bottom and all the other pieces are put
together so this is something I need to do early.
I'm not going to be able to show you that step
right now but later on I will put the doors up
to the case and transfer the locations of these
marks directly to the doors to make sure that I get
the perfect fit and each hinge is perfectly located.
For now we're going to focus directly on the case.
The first step is to get to know your hinge.
This particular hinge is perfect for a three quarter
inch door and that's what we have here, and the distance
from the end of the leaf of the hinge to the middle
of the barrel is about three quarters of an inch and
ideally that's the kind of spacing you want.
When this is on the surface here you want the edge,
the front of the work piece, to be at the point
that it's about halfway into this barrel.
That is the measurement we're really concerned with
as far as how deep or how far back that hinge goes.
I'm going to use my marking gauge here and
I'm actually going to set it so that it
is directly in the middle of that barrel.
Just like so.
Once you have that setting it's really as simple
as transferring that to your actual work piece.
Before we do that we do need to know
where these hinges are going to be located.
Two things that you have to consider:
You have to consider the doors,
so the rails of the doors may be in certain positions.
In general it's nice to have that hinge
right above where that bottom rail is and
right below where the top rail is, if you can.
Sometimes certain door styles -- not stiles,
s-t-y-l-e-s is what I'm referring to.
A different style of a door may dictate that
the rail is thinner and it won't really
work to have this right above the rail.
In that case then I simply go a hinge length
from the top and a hinge length from the
bottom and those would be my two locations.
Once you have the general location set for your two
hinges it's not a bad idea to use a story stick at
this point if you've got a number of these to do.
And this actually may come in handy for locating the hinges
onto the doors themselves, is to have something with
those marks located on them that is a reference for you.
Generally you call that a story stick.
This is one that I got from Wood Peckers.
I didn't know how much I would ever use this
and frankly I don't use it that often because
it's so easy to just grab a piece of wood,
lay it on the surface and put your marks on it like a
traditional story stick, but this one is kind of neat.
It's got these little tabs on here to set your locations.
You reference it from the top of the leg and run it down.
I can't because my clamp is there,
but you have the locations here.
Now when I have to do the other one I pop it up on
the bench, drop this down and I mark those locations,
and I can make sure that everything is consistently
located from one cabinet side to the other.
Once you have these marks here you need to
then basically slice across the grain.
Just like any type of inlay,
we just did it in the video recently that showed
you how to trace around an oddly shaped work piece.
This is the same thing only it's a lot easier
because it's a nice rectangular shape,
it's really not that difficult to do.
Basically you want to make sure that your
hinge fits in between those two lines so
you're not making it too big or too small.
In fact just to double check
myself here's what I like to do.
I'll take my top line here and I grab my adjustable
square and I'm going to put a cut line,
scribe a line right where that pencil line is.
I don't need to go too deep I just
want to slice across the grain.
Once I have a reasonable cut there I go back to my hinge.
I'm pretty sure that my pencil line is a good
accurate instrument but I want to make sure.
What I'll do is put the X-ACTO knife into the slot
that I just cut. Then I pull the hinge across
until it makes contact with that X-ACTO knife,
so I know it's right up against it.
Then I'll come back over to this side putting
pressure on that hinge and I'll make
a little mark, basically start a cut.
You don't want to go too far because right now the hinge
may not be perfectly square, I just want a starting point.
Now that starting point is enough that I could
very easily with my X-ACTO knife move it across
and get it locked down into that little slot.
Then I could bring my square up to the X-ACTO knife.
Hold it nice and tight in position.
Now it happens to be right on my pencil line.
That's a good thing, we measured properly,
but this is just a little bit of an insurance policy
that you're taking your final measurement directly from your
hinge and not from what we thought was the right measurement.
You don't want to find out after the
fact that you cut your mortise too wide.
Now the final thing that we have to
do is account for the thickness of the hinge.
You can easily do that using the marking gauge again
and adjust it for the thickness of the hinge,
mark along the side here and then use your chisel and
chisel away all the excess and go back to your lines.
Like I said that's perfectly viable it's
just a little bit longer than I really want
to devote to this part of the project.
I really like to use a router for this operation.
What I've got is my little Bosch Colt here
which is perfect for this type of thing.
I put the hinge on the base and adjust my router
bit so that it's perfectly even with the hinge.
If you're not sure put some pressure down on the hinge,
make sure it's nice and flat and then
bring some sort of straight edge across.
You barely just want to feel the tip of
that router bit touching your straight edge.
If it's just a hair, just a little hair
proud so that you're making this a little bit
deeper that's really not that big of a deal,
you just don't want the hinge to sit proud of this surface.
Usually with this you even have a little
micro-adjustment here. It's pretty easy to nail it so
that you get it perfectly where you need it to be.
At least again with the router it's going to
be consistent for all four of these that I do.
No matter how confident you are that you have that router
set perfectly it's always a good idea to do a test
run on a piece of scrap and test for yourself.
If it feels perfectly flush you're good to go.
(drilling)
Don't be tempted to get it all with the router.
As you start to approach that line you
could see it gets a little bit dicey.
Leave yourself a little bit of room
and then come back with your chisel.
Drop it right down into your scribe line like so.
And chop down. We're going to
do the cross grain cuts first.
(pounding)
Let's do the other side.
When you have this little area back here,
there's a little excessive material.
Sometimes I like to cut that up a little
bit just to relieve some of that pressure.
Right into the scribe line once again.
Now we can go with the grain.
If we chop here first instead of doing the end grain first
we run the risk of splitting this piece along this grain
line so we always want to do that end grain first.
Any excess I trim away, referencing from the bottom.
All right that looks pretty good.
Let's see how we did.
There you go. See, no movement at all, sits right in.
Nice and flush. That's perfect.
I'm just going to interrupt myself for a minute here.
Not sure what I was thinking at the
time but that mortise is not perfect.
You see that little gap here?
That's not cool and I would not
have left that in my final product.
Fortunately if you look here you can see the
barrel is not quite at the half way point.
This means if I remove just a little bit of material over
here the hinge will sit perfectly square as intended.
Okay, back to the show.
I won't be fully installing this hinge until
everything is together. As long as the mortise
is there it's going to be very easy to pre-drill
and add the screws so that's no problem.
The doors are going to be done in much the same way
except for I'm going to use the work piece itself to
transfer the locations of these mortises to those doors,
very similar to what I did for the gadget station
if some of you remember that installation.
Beyond that that's really just about it.
The doors are three quarters of an inch and so is this hinge
so this hinge leaf will actually span the entire door,
there won't be any material behind the hinge so we're
going to go across the entire thickness of the door stile.
That's really about it. This is my standard procedure for
pretty much every butt hinge that I've ever installed.
I find it the easiest way to go and very quick.
Hopefully you'll be able to try some of
this on your own and let me know what kind
of results you get. Thanks for watching.
(upbeat guitar music)