Inlaid Wooden Hinges #3: Glueing the inlays.

This is now the home stretch….not long to go.
1. Left hand side base inlays.
These inlays are going to be glued into the base. Make sure that they slide in easily before applying glue. Remember which face is the reference!

I use drills of the correct diameter to get the centreline of the hinge pin in the correct position. The centreline should be on the mid point of the over lap which is about 8 mm. In this case I set the centreline at 4 mm.
When I have glued these base inserts previously I used some Titebond3 glue as it has a long set up time.
On this prototype I used Gorilla glue because I had run out of Titebond. I think the set up time for Gorilla is about 4 nanoseconds because I barely had enough time to seat the inserts and get the hinge pin to rest on the drill packers. A lesson learnt.

2. Right hand side inlays.
Because there is no hole at the end these inlay trenches the inlays have to be an exact length. Earlier I showed how I marked the length for these inlays. Ít is better to cut then slightly long say 1/64. At this stage you can drill the hinge pin hole. Then using the same packing drills as step 1 above, place the assembly of 4 inlays with the pin into the pocket. You can then see if they are too long because the brass hinge pin will not touch the packing drills. Adjust by reducing the length of the inlays taking some stock off the radiused end.Make sure you do a neater job of this than I have done here.

Because this right hand side has some acrylic inlays, I used a 24 hour two part epoxy to glue the inlays in place.

When the glue has set withdraw the hinge pins using pliers. At this stage you should have two sets of base hinge inlays with a correctly aligned hinge pin hole in each.3. Hinge pin length.
Cut the hinge pin to the final length. I make them about 0.5mm shorter than the pocket width.

4. Shaping the lower inlays
To allow the lid to swing open, it is necessary to radius the inlays on the base. I have chosen to do that at this point and I simply use a rasp/file to get the shape and it is all done by eye. In the future I think I would do this operation on the sander to each of the inlays prior to glue up.

5.Lid inlays Left hand side.
These are cut to approx length as previously. Here I aim to have the end of the inlay going about 1/3 of the way into the 6mm hole at the end of the trench. The actual length is not critical as long as you have some of the inlay encroaching on the 6mm hole.

6.Right hand side lid inlays.
This is similar to mounting the lower inlays. Make the inlay as long as the trench and then drill the hinge hole with the jig. At this stage you can thread the inlays onto hinge pin in order and dry assemble the parts. I purposely made these slightly too long and then got the exact fit by reducing the length on the radiused end.

7. Final glue up.
Before the final glue up you can slide the lid and base together and make sure that the split line is perfectly even and that the upper inlays all seat home. Because the inlays protrude about 1 mm from the back face you will not be able to fully open the hinge. When you later remove that 1 mm and make the back flush the hinge should fully open.

This picture shows the hinge ready for glue up. I use the 2 part slow setting epoxy for the final glue up as you need plenty of time to get everything in place and the inlays seated home. Absolutely imperative that you do not get any glue in the hinge overlap area. I chose to have the lid side on the bench upside down and then carefully applied the glue to the trench areas only. The big benefit with this system is that everything automatically lines up so getting the fit right between a base and lid on a box is a breeze.

8. Final clean up.
After the glue had set, I used an small block plane and an orbital sander to remove the excess inlay stock.

The next step is to plug the 6 mm holes. To do this I would normally make some teak dowels 1/4 dia and redrill the 6mm holes to 1/4’diameter. Here I made the 1/4” dia plugs from some red acrylic to see how it would look.

The red plugs were set in place with quick set epoxy and then sanded back to be flush.
Here a few pictures of the finished hinges…...

You can see the Right Hand side inlays are poorly fitted and no where near as neat as the left hand side. This has all been a bit rushed.
I would be interested to hear what you think about the acrylic inlays. I think they open up some opprtunities for colour contrast on some boxes.

regards from Sydney

-- And my head I'd be a scratchin'