Replies

1. 
   9619 | Mar 25, 2010 08:49am | #1

   Pat,

   You didn't mortise them in far enough.

   There are lots of writeups on installing butt hinges.  Have you read them.  They seem simple, and they are, once you have done a bunch of them, but the first one is far from simple.

   Mel

1. 
   pakman1 | Mar 25, 2010 09:19am | #2

   Thanks Mel. I kind of figured they were in too far or not far enough, but I wasn't sure. Thankfully, not far enough in is the better of the two problems. Thanks again.

   Pat

1. 
   WillGeorge | Mar 25, 2010 09:35am | #3

   Mel has a point. However, sometimes a door may need a slight angle to allow it to close.. Depending on how tight of a fit you have and the thickness of the door on the 'swing' when closing.....

   just me..... However.. 1/8 inch seems to be a bit more into what Mel stated.

2. 
   9619 | Mar 25, 2010 10:08am | #4

   Pat,

   Getting the mortise to the right depth is easy when you have the right tools and you have used them a lot.      Some folks like to use a router, because it can get the right depth throughout the mortise.  HOWEVER, you can do a lot of damage with a router is less than a half a second.   Traditionally folks used a chisel.  This works if you have the skill, and have marked out the depth well.     So how does one mark out the depth?    I use a cutting gauge -- one with a round fence which is adjustable.  Adjust it to exactly the thickness of the hinge, and then test it on a scrap piece of wood to see if the depth really matches the thickness of the hinge.      Then use the cutting gauge to mark the depth for the full width of the hinge.    Use a knife to mark where the front and two sides of the hinge meet the wood.   Then use a SHARP chisel to go deeper than the knife can go.   Then  carefully and slowly, take your chisel and take off shavings.   I start at the edges and take some steep cuts toward my lines which were deepened with the chisel after knifing them.    Then  I start taking shavings across the entire mortise.  After every shaving or two, I check to see if I am down to the depth line that I marked with the cutting gauge.    

   WHEN I AM CLOSE to the depth line, I get out my trusty small router plane, and set it carefully to the depth line, and then I check it to see if it needs to be adjusted.   Then I finalize the bottom of the hinge mortise with the small router plane.

   There are about a million ways to do this.   I am not recommending mine,  just letting you know how I do it.  You'll figure out something that works for you.    Just realize that everyone has the same problems when they do their first few butt hinges.  

   Have fun.

   Mel

1. 
   WillGeorge | Mar 25, 2010 10:57am | #5

   I use a commom bastard file...

3. 
   PSeverin | Mar 25, 2010 12:17pm | #6

   A bit too far?

   From the description of the door not closing all the way I think the hinges are set too deep.  Try setting a small piece to cardboard (tag board) under each hinge and see if that helps before going any deeper.  If that works and you still have door width to play with try planing off a bit of material from the hinge side of the door and remove the cardboard

    If it's not closing, it must be binding on something and cutting it deeper is probably not going to help.

   Peter

1. 
   davcefai | Mar 25, 2010 01:53pm | #7

   Another possiblity is that the screw-heads are bumping into each other. To check, remove screws from each half of the hinge so that a head on one side does not have an opposing one.

   Solutions: Use more suitable screws, tighten the screws more (careful, brass shears easily), try to countersink the hinge holes a little more or cut one of the mortises an a slight angle i.e. deeper on the inside.

   Ideally the hinge leafs should be dead flush with the wood and the butt should overlap both pieces of wood equally.

4. 
   hammer1 | Mar 25, 2010 03:12pm | #8

   Butt hinges should be morticed flush with the surface, definitely not deeper. The door will hit on the frame .

5. 
   zolton | Mar 26, 2010 08:25am | #9

   Hammer,

   You've got it. This is a condition called "hinge bound." It sounds as though the hinges are set too deep, and that allows the door stile to hit the cabinet frame as the door closes. It's common in poorly hung house doors as well. If you look at the hinges closely as the door is forced shut, you can often see the hinges being displaced by the pressure placed on them.

   Inserting a piece of cardboard under one side of the hinge leaf to make the mortise shallower is a time-honored way of dealing with this situation, as pointed out by another poster.

   Zolton

6. 
   JohnWW | Mar 26, 2010 08:31am | #10

   Mortise depth isn't used to adjust a door's fit.

   Pat,

   As already pointed out the mortises are cut so that the leaf of the hinge is flush with the wood around it, the depth of the mortise isn't used to adjust the fit of the door. 

   If you size the door for the opening it is going in minus twice the width of the space between the leaves of the hinge you should get the clearance you need and an even gap on both the hinge and latch sides of the door.

1. 
   joinerswork | Mar 26, 2010 09:46am | #11

   John, and All,

   Standard shop practice wherever I've worked is to fit the door to its opening, adjusting the fit to get the gap you want all round, then hang the door, inletting the hinges to a depth that keeps the gap where you want it.

   If you do not want the gap around the door to be as large as the space between the leaves of the hinge (frequently 1/8" or so, and can be more with iron butt hinges), you must inlet one or both the hinge leaves deeper than their thickness.

   A hinging technique used by one 18thcentury shop here in the Shenandoah Valley, was to put a scratch bead (that is the width of the hinge barrel) around the door opening  (1/4" or so), and inlet nearly the whole hinge thickness into the frame, so that the hinge barrel aligned with the bead.  The hinge leaf that mounted to the door stile was simply screwed to the stile, not inletted at all, and the thickness of that leaf thus determined the gap around the door.  Not orthodox procedure, for sure, but it works!

   At Va Craftsmen where I worked in the early 1970's, the shop had hinge recess templets that were used to uniformly (from one cutting to the next, from one bench man to another) inlet hinges for the various pieces the shop reproduced.  These hinge leaf depths were all different, (as were the gaps around the doors of the various pieces), some were even different depths from one leaf to another on the same hinge, with one leaf being inletted flush, and the other leaf recess' depth used to determine the door's gap.

   The thin rolled brass butt hinges commonly available nowadays give the intrepid woodworker some leeway when hanging doors, because they are so easily bent:

   On one of my first visits to the shop of Carlyle Lynch, I watched him squeezing the leaves of a brass butt hinge in a metalworking vise to reduce the gap between them so that he could both inlet the leaves flush and have a small gap around the door.

   One of the old timers at Va Craftsmen showed me a "trick" used to either remedy a hinge bound door, or to adjust a discrepancy in the door's gap: He put a small block of 1/4" plywood between the leaves of the hinge-bound hinge, and gently pushed the door closed on the block-- the hinge leaves were sprung apart, just the opposite of Lynch's trick, unbinding the door, at the same time of course, closing the gap a bit at the lock side of the door.  Down and dirty, but effective, and faster than gluing in a slip of veneer into the recess to pack  out the hinge.

   Ray