Backyard Birds – Part 33

Putting hinges on a cabinet door and making sure that it fits properly in the door opening is a frustrating process. Even for my dad, who has been doing this for 50 years, there’s a lot of drilling holes, realizing that they’re not in exactly the right place, patching them, and re-drilling the holes 1/64th of an inch forward or backward… repeat, ad nauseam.

Worse, the first packet of screws that I bought for the project were weak. Two of them broke in half when I tried to screw them in, leaving half the screw inside the wood of the cabinet. I spent hours digging them out, trying and failing to avoid making huge holes.

Luckily, the second pack of screws that I bought was much higher quality and didn’t break, and none of the patched holes will be visible because they will be covered by the hinges.

For my cabinet, I had an additional complication: my door and the opening that it fit into were not rectangular. I had shaped the door earlier, sanding down the edge of the marquetry vase so that it was smooth, but I couldn’t shape the opening until I had the door on hinges.

I got the door hinged as well as I could, given that it couldn’t close all the way, and then I slowly shaped the door opening, first with a rasp and then with sandpaper.

I clamped scrap wood to the inside of the door opening to prevent the padauk from chipping as I shaped it. That was effective, but it also meant that I had to constantly take the clamps on and off so that I could test whether the door was closing.

After many hours of rasping and sanding, the door opening was smooth.

The door was still tight and hard to close all the way, so I had to do some additional sanding on the flat surfaces. I ran a piece of paper along between the door and the frame to figure out where it was too tight.

After lots of sanding, the door closed without rubbing against the frame.