captain_aggravated

Friends, fellows, lurkers, I have suffered a temporary field promotion. For the duration of this post you may address me as Major Aggravated.

I am building a sideboard/buffet/server/credenza/whatever you want to call a low cabinet for the dining room. Shaker style, mostly out of walnut. It features posts/legs at the corners to which the doors will be directly hinged, and the way I've designed this cabinet, the doors will be 3/4" thick, and sit 1/4" inset from the front of the leg. The leg is 1+3/4" thick, so there's 3/4" of leg inside the cabinet. There are other structural reasons I did it this way.

This complicates the matter of door hinges. I know of no pin-and-barrel hinge that will do the job, there's some weird specialty mortise mount concealed hinges that I'm just not sure if they'll work in this application, pivot hinges are too "too cheap for Ikea" for the project, and then there's European-style concealed cup hinges. I've known of these things for awhile but never really looked into them.

Until a couple weeks ago.

These hinges attach to the door with two screws and a big fuckoff hole. The offset from the edge might change slightly from project to project but the door half is pretty standard across the range.

On the cabinet side, there's like 8 different ways they can attach, depending on the anatomy of the cabinet, whether it has a face frame or not and if there are any offsets to consider.

The hinges actually come in two halves, the door side with the cup and the bracket for the cabinet side, and they clip together in a standard way, so that you can fuck up and mix and match parts in ways that won't work.

There isn't a European hinge made to attach to my cabinet as designed, because it sort of does and doesn't have a face frame simultaneously. The no-frame type wants to screw to a wall farther back than the leg, so that's a no-go, and the face mount type wants to attach to a face frame that is flush with the back of the door. They don't really make this easy to learn. They like to refer to the features of their hinges by marketing names that they never explain anywhere, and they don't really describe what they do. You just have to learn that "BLUMotion" means it has a damper through osmosis.

No website that sells these damn things organizes them well. Go shopping for wood screws, you get 90,000 results and you can then refine it by shank diameter, length, drive type, button or bugle head, self-tapping or no, self-countersinking or no, material/coating/finish etc. until you have 3 results, a 4-piece bag, a 50 count box and a 50 pound bucket.

Not these goddamn euro hinges. Nowhere that sells euro hinges in the Western hemisphere does it that way. It seems like a wholesaler buys parts from Blum, assembles them into kits, and these kits get dropshipped on eBay, Amazon, Rockler, the usual scumbags. So you don't get to query a database to narrow down your selection, you get to try to guess what search term will get you what you need and then look at the pictures, a practice that shall henceforth be known as "euro shopping."

You'll see the same marketing images on different platforms accompanied by different diagrams, dimensional drawings or installation instructions. Put it all together and they still don't tell you everything you need to know. I note that Rockler issues their own manuals for these things, not Blum's. Looking at Blum's publications, I can understand why.

I finally figure up what hinge set I think I need, given the little diagrams they provide. I order a few sets for my current and immediate future projects.

What arrives is not what I ordered.

The door side, the actual hinge, looks right. But it comes with the wrong bracket. I see they sell just the brackets, I can order those and get them faster than processing a return. I order some of those. They fit. I make a model out of scrap to make sure they'll work, and the reveal between the frame and the door is like a quarter inch too big. Because it turns out the curvy bit of the hinge is 9.2 more bodacious than what I need, and you'd only learn that by carefully comparing the hinge in your hand with two diagrams in their catalog.

None of the components are stamped with a model or part number. Hell, the people selling these hinge sets don't say "Contents: 2x 640449 hinges, 2x 630449 brackets" so you can compare to Blum's catalog.

It's the smell of ten million monkeys fucking ten million footballs.

It's very irritating. And I'm making a lot of it this week. Shut your tracts folks, this one's a doozy.

A surprising amount of cat hair, I think I need to brush her more. I just kept pulling balls of felt that had once been cat hair out of the workings of the scroll wheel.

It feels sooo much exactly the same now.

It's a little scratch and dent given it's made out of offcuts, scraps and extras from other projects but I think it came out okay. Three coats of fake "tung oil" finish and it came up to a nice warm semi-gloss, and ambered up the pine enough to take the edge off the grain.

Detail shot of the side hung, center guided drawer and its rabbeted dovetail front and shop made handle.

Yeah I'm going on a bit of a victory lap here, I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out.

I'm slapping together a night stand for my cousin out of crap I have lying around the shop, and I'm using the project as an excuse to try out some stuff.

Carcass is "hardwood" mystery meat 7-ply from Lowe's. Joinery is all dovetails; lower shelf and mid frame are sliding dovetails, upper frame is half-blinds. I did that to see if I could. Answer: Barely. The sliding dovetails were fine but the half-blinds wanted to blow the plywood apart.

Face frame is rift sawn traumatized pine. That's what I managed to salvage from a damaged section of 8:4, and judging by the growth rings that tree had been through at least one divorce. The curve on the bottom I laid out with a bowed spline. First time I've actually done that. It's attached to the carcass Norm style, with Tite-bond and #10 biscuits.

Tomorrow I'll build the drawer.

I have a Porter Cable dovetail jig. It works reasonably well when it's properly aligned, but properly aligning it a hilariously clumsy process of guess and check. The alignment lines on the templates are on the top surface, so there's a quarter inch of parallax error, and the brass adjustment nuts aren't graduated in any meaningful way. The instructions say things like "If the joint is too loose, move the jig away from you." How far? Depends on where you hold your head. It results in a guess-and-check, guess and check mentality. There is no try, measure how far off it is, and adjust it based on that measurement.

I solved both of these problems with a knife.

I printed out a little wagon wheel looking thing to use as a guide so I could put some graduation marks around the brass thumb screws. They run on a 16TPI threaded rod, so 1 full turn drives it 1/16th inch, 1/2 turn 1/32", 1/4 turn 1/64", and 1/8 turn 1/128". I stopped there because that's about the limits of my ability or need to measure. It's not on an absolute scale, but now I can move both sides of the template with some precision, if not accuracy.

I also scribed an alignment line on the back of the template, and then down each side of each template tooth. The factory alignment lines are like 1/16" wide or better, so I just scribed the location of the center. That should eliminate parallax error.

I'll give it a test run tomorrow and see if I helped it any.

After several small projects, it was time for a cleaning and organizing. Spent like 3 hours and the place is still a disorganized wreck. I've just got too much shit in a little building.

I also dropped a clamp on my foot, -2hp.

But, the place is somewhat less dusty now.

god. dammit I have to table saw this butcher block apart.

Making some cutting boards, not sure why, maybe my table saw is cutting a bevel or something, but the parts didn't line up perfectly, so now I have to flatten a couple end grain cutting boards. Which is rather difficult to do. I hope I burned some good calories throwing my bench plane back and forth for awhile.

What it came up with is too good not to share: