There’s something I love about the concept of a wood hinged box. I’m not sure why I find this so compelling, maybe it’s my aversion to standard hinges; I tend to think they’re a necessary evil, but always seem out of place. The only reason they don’t stand out more is because we’re all used to seeing them. I think these wood hinge boxes stand out specifically because they have don’t have a hunk of metal holding the lid down.
I’ve tried multiple times to get this right, with unsatisfactory results. My first attempt started with enough material for 6 small boxes, which was down to 4 by the time I got to the hinge stage, and finished with one substandard result. This weekend I did get one complete that I think is acceptable… Not perfect but passable, and more importantly, I believe I finally understand the last hurdle to be happy with them.
Making the Wood Hinge Box
I’m not going to write a tutorial, I just want to address a few pitfalls. If you’re interested in these hinges, go watch at least one of Rob Cosman’s excellent videos. There’s 3 main videos where he walks extensively through the process, and you can see what the real end result looks like. The first 2 links have a great intro that show some beautiful examples, even if you don’t want to sit through the whole video.
The concept itself is deceptively simple. Make a dowel out of the same wood as the back of the box you’re making, route a groove in the back of the box and the lid to fit it into, cut the dowel into pieces, insert holes into the centre of those dowel pieces so you can pin them together with a pivot point, then glue it all together.
So, where can you go wrong? Here’s where I hit trouble, and how I’ve worked around it.
The Dowel
Firstly, the dowel. It needs to be perfect, or at least very, very close. Store bought dowels don’t cut it (and they won’t match the wood you’re building with). I bought a couple of dowel making templates and the end result either wasn’t perfect, or wasn’t smooth. In case of the latter, once it was sanded to properly smooth it was then no longer consistently sized all the way along. I finally had to make my own jig, once again thanks to a Rob Cosman video. This is simple and extremely effective. I do have a couple of comments about it, but I’ll make another post about that one day.
The Groove
Next, routing the groove. This has proven to be the biggest problem for me, and was again the biggest issue I had in this last build I did. You need a groove the exact size of the dowel (hence why accuracy on the dowel is so important). The placement of the router groove is vital, and not completely spelled out in Rob’s videos. He does explain it in depth, so maybe it’s just my interpretation or skill that was lacking. Anyway, you want the router bit high enough that half the dowel will be embedded in the back, and half in the lid; a little too deep is recoverable, but it can’t be much.
The distance in from the rear is where I’ve made most of my mistakes. The videos make it appear to me that it’s similar to the depth, just over half in. After multiple tests, this is clearly not correct – it needs to be roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of the way into the back; there’s almost none of the router outside of the box. More in than out. You want a significant little lip hanging out for the dowel to sit inside. Rob does explain this but for whatever reason I didn’t get it until I failed multiple times. If none of this is making sense, hopefully it will after you watch one of his videos.
The Pivot Holes
The last big gotcha that is more difficult than it sounds, is the drilling of the holes for the pins in the dowel pieces. This needs to be perfectly centred between every piece, otherwise they just won’t pivot properly. After my first couple of failures, I broke down and bought Rob’s jig for this. There’s probably cheaper solutions but I couldn’t find them, and my time for woodworking is limited.
Anyway, there’s a lot of other smaller issues along the way, but Rob explains them all better than I could. The 3 points I outlined above are just the ones where I made mistakes outside of the video series, that I thought could perhaps save someone time one day.