A simple cabinet with solid brass butt hinges. (The door does fit perfectly, though it appears not to here, as it’s slightly ajar.) Butt hinges were widely used for inset doors in early-20th-century furniture and built-ins. They are available in a variety of styles, types, and sizes to suit many different applications. In the English shops where I worked in the 1980s, we always used plain unswaged hinges; we knew them as solid-drawn brass butts. These have a fixed pin and are not adjustable (except by means of various old-timer tricks; I’ll reveal these in a future post); as a result, they’re less handy than loose-pin hinges for hanging large doors.
Still, they are ideal for most furniture and cabinets. A well-made hinge with a fixed pin has virtually no play and is a dream to open and close. Oddly, the practice in those English shops where I worked was to mortise the hinge only into the door stile, not the cabinet — a method that saves labor but is arguably less durable, especially for heavy doors, because the entire weight of the door is borne by the screws. Razvertki dlya pepakura for mac. Contrast this with cases in which the hinge is mortised partly into the door frame and partly into the cabinet, where the bottom ledge of the mortise helps to support the door’s weight. Most American examples I’ve seen use this method, so it’s the method I will outline here using from Paxton Hardware. Tools you will need: A handplane for fitting the door, chisel, mallet, pair of marking gauges, marking knife, temporary screws and screwdriver, square, pencil, drill and Vix bit, and a couple of coins for shimming 1.
Lay out the hinge position For early-20th-century frame and panel doors, I use the rail-to-stile intersection as a guide. In this case I extended the rail position across the stile with a square, then measured 5/8″ in (i.e. Up or down from the bottom or top, respectively). This point became the outer vertical location of each hinge. Mark the stile Square the vertical starting lines you determined in step 1 around the edge of the hinge stile. Now mark the inner end of the hinge Lay the hinge in place with its outer end just touching the first location line you made (in step 2 above) and mark the other end with a knife.
After you have marked both ends of each hinge, square the line around to the front. (In the illustration immediately above, you can see this line at the left end of the door.) When I had marked the position of the lower end with the knife, as shown above, I extended it onto the face of the stile in pencil. You could use a knife to make the mark on the face, but at this stage you still don’t know the precise point at which the mark will need to end; making it in pencil allows you to remove any excess later.
Scribe the hinge depth It’s handiest to use two marking gauges when laying out mortises for butt hinges: one for the depth, the other for the thickness. In this case, “depth” refers to the distance from the center of the hinge’s pin (the metal dowel in the center of the barrel) to the outside of each leaf, or flap. Hold the marking gauge’s fence against the outside of the leaf and set it so the marking pin hits the center of the hinge pin. Now use the marking gauge to scribe this depth onto the edge of the hinge stile, staying within the outside lines you marked in step 2 above. At this stage the layout should look like this: 5. Scribe the hinge thickness In applications where the hinge is mortised partly into the door and partly into the cabinet, each mortise needs to be about half the thickness of the hinge’s barrel. I say “ about half” because if you were to mortise the entire thickness of the barrel, you wouldn’t be able to open the door; it would be hinge bound, to use the carpenter’s term of art.