Thread: Wooden Hinges

hi ian,
i make wooden hinges (not many) they do take alot of time and some times wasted times!
i do them similar to the incra jig way , made my own jigs to do it though. they are alot bigger i think than r. gifkins way.
the cylinders on mine are 10 by 10mm and i can only make them 4 barrels wide on each flap , if you understand that.
the woods that i have had success with are any straight grained hard wood. your silver ash and rosewood would seem ideal to me , but try the other woods , they may suit your projects better and it doesnt waste much wood.
happy box making.
seeyasoon mik.
ps. post some pics of jigs and hinges when i can pull the digit.

Ian,

I had a go at making my first wooden hinges 2 months ago. I made them using a handplane and chisels for the shaping.

The hinges were used on a redgum box I made for an old plane I restored for a mate. I used Canadian Rock Maple for the hinges because I have heaps of it and it contrasted with the redgum.

The hinges were attached to the top of the box and the back of the box with sliding dovetails. I didn't bother gluing the hinges to the box because the fit was firm.

I was pleased with the results in that they worked well and looked OK but the work making them took quite some time. This was my first attempt and I am confident future wooden hinges will take less time.

I will post some photos for you when I remember.

- Wood Borer

I Have a zipped bitmap on how to make Knuckle joints. It's just a bit too big to post here, Happy to email it to any interested.

It's from The Wood Worker's Manual by Jackson & Day.

Glenn
[email protected] (remove dot splinter)

Ian,

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- Wood Borer

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- Wood Borer

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- Wood Borer

Thanks for comments, everyone.

Woodborer - I can see now the logic in dovetailing and not gluing your hinges - because you are across the grain for the full width/height of the box on both the back and top. On a box like yours, this design makes pretty good sense. For smaller boxes where I don't necessarily want to make a special feature of the hinges, I need to keep the hinges small to minimize the amount of long-to-cross grain glued surface.

I made a jig to cut the slots with my hand router (rather than using the table mounted router as R. Gifkins does) and this worked well. Now I'm making a couple more jigs: 1) to align the hinges to bore the holes, plus 2) support the tiny pieces whilst doing the round-overs on the table-mounted router. [my fingers don't need any more rounding over]

I'll post some pictures when I finish, though this will be a challenge for my camera focussing on things this small.

Ian R.

I finished a batch of hinges last weekend ... see photo. I'll also post a few other photos of the jigs I made with description.

Timber: I had good success with Jarrah, Beefwood, and (I think) Myrtle. Moderate success with Silver Ash, and poor success with Queensland Maple, Rock Maple, and Blackwood. Though to be fair, the Qld Maple and Blackwood pieces I was using were not quarter-sawn (if you can think of a piece of timber 16mm wide by 6mm thick as quarter-sawn, that is).

Ian R.

Photo of hinges ....

The one on the left is Beefwood.
In the Centre is Myrtle (I think)
The two on the right are Jarrah.
The pins are bamboo toothpicks, not glued.

I cut about 70 hinges in all and ended up with about 45 good ones plus a few spare halves that I might be able to use on the next batch.

Here is the main jig to cut the finger-joints using mu Festo plunge router.

It is made of 32mm MDF that has a laminex (?) top, elevated above benck level about 80mm (3 inches), and clamped over the edge of my workbench so I can use pieces of stock up to about 900 mm long. After cutting the finger joints I dock them to 20mm length in lots of 6 and then start again.

The work pieces are held in position by a 16mm dowel that I drilled lengthways through the MDF and clamped using the over-centre locoking clamp shown. This way I am holding the work pieces only 8mm below the top - but via a piece of wood rather via a metal clamp - important not only for stability but also becuase the router bit is plunged 6.3mm!

Close up of 16mm dowel clamping 3 work pieces at once.

Jig with router. Note the fence on the left with a series of shims (only one shown). These shims have to be made very carefully - each one wider than the other by twice the width of the cut. Although I was using a 1/8 inch bit (3.175mm diameter) the cuts were averaging 3.34mm wide, so each shim was wider than the other by 6.68mm. Plunge is equal to the tickness of the stock plus 0.3 mm (in my case, 6.3mm plunge).

Ian R.

a type of hinge on radio controlled aircraft

photo 1