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Hi Paul,

Thanks for sending your well written, thoughtful reply. This is the type of reply I would hope to receive from someone from this group.

After sending out the initial message, I did a little experimenting on my own and after a few tries, some breakage, and a little more head-scratching, I came up with a pretty good way of making hinges from maple and walnut.

I used a box-joint jig and 3/8" thick wood. I used 1/8" brass rod for the hinge pin.

I think I basically came to the same type of hinge you described with a little bit of messing around on my part.

Thanks again for your written explanation, I hope this will help someone else in the group.

Best regards,
Craig

Thank you Paul for an excellent response to a question by a fellow club member!  Just reading your response makes me want to make something with wooden hinges just so I could try some of the solutions you provided. 

Yale

Craig, If you go to the hardware store you can find thousands of different styles of hinges. Any of those styles can be duplicated in wood.

Of course metal hinges, size for size, are going to be stronger than ones made from wood. So first, you need to know how strong you want your hinge to be and then use thick enough wood to accomplish that goal.

The basic parts of a hinge are the two leaves. The fat part of each leave would be the knuckle or knuckles. These are hollow cylinders. When the knuckles are positioned together (interwoven) so that the cylinders align the group is called the barrel of the hinge. A pin is put down the bore of the barrel and the two leaves can move but not come apart. The hinge folds around the axis of the pin.

So, designing your hinge you start with the pin. If you use a 1/4” dowel for a pin you would want the hinge made from 3/4” thick softwood or down to 1/2” thick hardwood. This is basically the same math as used for sizing dowel or mortise/tenon joints where the tenon is surrounded by wood roughly as thick. 1/4” dowel, as a joint or as a pivot in a hinge, would have 1/4” of wood on either side for a total of 3/4”. But you could make it more delicate by using 1/2”.

Going down in sizing: with a 1/8” hardwood dowel you could work with 3/8” stock down to 1/4”.

If you wanted something thinner, consider cheap bamboo skewers. They need some sanding before use. You won’t know their diameter until after you make them round. Sand them first, find a drill bit to match second, base the thickness of your wood for your hinge on that. It is frankly a backwards approach to designing a project.

No one says you MUST use wood pins in your hinges. For smaller hinge pins you can use steel or brass wire brads. Use a wire cutter to remove the heads, bury the end of the pin in the knuckle and fill the hole with a drop of glue and a toothpick. Once the glue hardens and the toothpick is sanded down it looks great. Only wood visible, but the strength of a metal pin. Works in materials as thin as 3mm or 1/8”, solid or plywood.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I have some 1/16” bronze brazing rod I’d use instead of brads. It comes in 36” lengths at about $14 a pound from Indiana Oxygen or other Indianapolis area welding suppliers. Very strong, I can cut to length, Won’t rust, Smooth and even diameter that matches common drill bit I already have.

Now, consider the design of your project. Do you want to add a hinge to an existing item or do you just need a moving part?
In the first case you want a visible functional hinge as a design element. In the second case you need only the hinge pin (visible or hidden) and you design the rest around that.

Let me describe an example of the second type. Consider a small wood box, a jewelry box perhaps, with 6 sides (top, bottom, left, right, front, and back. Design the box so the back and top are the two leaves of your hinge. The barrel of the hinge is the moveable joint that attaches the lid to the box. The top is free to move, left, right and bottom pieces are attached to the back, and the front goes, well, in front.

Once you cut the top and back into shapes that intertwine and work as hinge knuckles you can use any joinery technique you like to complete the box. The end of the hinge pin will be hidden by left and right side pieces during assembly.

Hope this helps.

Picture shows a simple wooden hinge used as a support for a folding shelf. The two outside knuckles are 3/8” x 3/4” x 2” long. The brace is 3/4” x 1 1/4” stock (cut down from a common 1 x2) and however long it took to get the shelf level. You can’t see it but the end by the knuckles was rounded over by first cutting a rough shape on the band saw, and then smoothing that with sandpaper. If you don’t round that end then the hard corners will act like levers and rip off the hinge! Hinge pin is 1/4” dowel.

To make the parts I stacked the two knuckles and drilled them together, centering the hole. Then I drilled through the center of the brace stock. Standard 1/4” drill bit was long enough to get through the parts this way. After drilling I attached knuckles outside the brace with a short dowel and a drop of white glue. Later I screwed the knuckles to the bottom of the shelf.

Craig.

I use the Incra jig for making wooden hinges for boxes. It has everything I have needed so far and works well.

The type of wood has not made much of a difference when making these hinges. Most breakages have come from (1) the speed of the drill bit and (2) the uniqueness of that piece of wood.

Mick
> On November 9, 2018 at 8:04 AM "Michael D Dellekamp (mdellekampp@gmail.com)" <mailer@mail2.clubexpress.com> wrote:
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> Craig,
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> For the pin, I use an oak dowel. For the tenons,  I just cut them from the same wood as the sides, unless looking for contrast.
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> Best to use a split tip bit with a stabilizing guide bushing to get the straightest hinge hole.
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> From: mailer@mail2.clubexpress.com [mailto:mailer@mail2.clubexpress.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 8, 2018 1:33 PM
> To: Ask a Member <AskaMember@ciww.org>
> Subject: [Ask A Member] wooden box hinges <<$217656571138$>>
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> Hi All,
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> Need advice/comments on making wooden box hinges. Has anyone done this? If yes, how, from what type of wood, etc.
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> Thanks,
> Craig
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Hi All,

Need advice/comments on making wooden box hinges. Has anyone done this? If yes, how, from what type of wood, etc.

Thanks,
Craig