Bending Hinges to Adjust Doors

here's something I know for a fact the older you get the more you tend to repeat yourself and I know I'm gonna be repeating myself about how to gun henges because I have this vague memory of having demonstrated how to bend hinges in my first book the door hangers handbook in my second book finished carpentry it was published by jlc I did it on my website years and years ago I did it again and this is carpentry I think I might have published an article on it even god I think I've probably covered this same material five or six times but the cool thing about Instagram is there's a whole bunch of folks that have never read any of that stuff and here's an opportunity for all of you to get it right from the Schaffer Brothers because that's where I learned how to do this and it's pretty simple let's take a look at this door first I here is just about right but as you look across the top of the door here it gets bigger and bigger and bigger in the right year my goodness I can get to heal a my wrench in here so it's way too big there look down here this gap is way too tight that door is almost jammed bound there's probably only about a sixteenth of an inch there so it'd be nice if we could spread this hinge and move the door further away from the jamb right here the gap on the strike side at the bottom of the jam here it is even bigger than it was at the top I could probably get two wrenches in there so if we spread that hinge over there and move the door then this direction away from the hinge jamb toward the strike jamb that'll make this gap smaller too now this gap here which is way too big we can adjust by spreading the hinge on the top of the door so what did we just do we just looked at the whole picture there are two ways to bend hinges there's the squeeze and there's the spread I'm going to show you both in just a second but before you can do either one you've got to look at the whole picture because a door is a rectangle within the rectangle of the jamb and you want to be able to move the rectangle of the door inside the rectangle of a jam and you have to keep it at points to do that from the bottom hinge and the top hinge you can spread them or you can squeeze them that means if I take that hinge over there and I spread it and I move this door down with the bottom near toward the strike jamb it's going to also raise the top of the door the head of the door and get it closer to the head jam which in this case is awesome now if there wasn't much of a gap between the top of the door and the head jam on the strike side it might not be such a good thing because if I spread that hands a lot and I close this gap up and there's no gap above the door at the jet at the ted jam on the strike side then the top of the door is gonna probably start to rub them on the head jamb that's why you have to look at the whole picture before you bend any hinges here's a stack hinge as I just grabbed out of my cabinet yeah they're kind of old I've had them hanging around for a while but I'll pull one box now let's open this thing up he's a brand new there's the screws here's the screws here's him just still wrapped in plastic let's pull the plastic off of both of them so we can take a good look at these things this hinge it was kind of funny people think they're identical coming one to the next and really you pull them out of the box and they learn at all I learned this finale Boyle shaper and it's something all of us need to learn hinges work because one of it leaves and actually both of them are bent just a little bit this one's got the swag in it right here or the leaf is bent at the knuckle on every single one of these knuckles check this out and you'll see what I mean this hinge is bent right there that's the swag and the hinge if you if there was no swag in the hinge then the leaves would touch each other and the hinge would beam hinge bound or leaf bound so let's look at this if you look at the distance there's space between the two leaves right they're not getting as close as I can you'll see it's probably about a sixteenth of an inch but if you look at the gap between the leaf on this this is great look at this you look between these two ears and there's hardly any gap at all maybe you can get a piece of paper in there and that's it so this hinge is gonna space the door a little bit more off the jamb than this hinge so if this were the top hinge you'd have a bigger gap between the door and the jamb then you would be at the bottom hinge at this hinge I hope you understand what I'm talking about this means that not every time but fairly often you got to make minor adjustments in the hinges to make sure that your gaps are equal and consistent all the way around the door especially on the hinge side so here's how you do it there are two ways to adjust the hinge one is by spreading it and you spread a hinge once it's attached to the jamb of the door with a nail set I just take my nail set I stick it right inside the hinge and push it hard against the barrel of the hinge and then close the door on it gently in two or three places and that way it opens up the space between the two leaves you don't want to do this with a bright brass hinge or a soft brass hinge because it'll leave a big dent if you want to open up a hinge like that boy you can use maybe a block of wood or the back the butt end of a shim but even that probably wouldn't work that well more than likely you're gonna have to back those hinges out and shim them between the jamb and the back of the hinge or between the back of the hinge in the door with flanca piece of laminate or something just a little bit at a time until you space that door off the jamb a little bit more that's the spread then there's just squeeze the squeeze is pretty simple too I use a crescent wrench for this I take the crescent wrench and I've put it on the knuckle right there and I bend the hinge by pulling line on a crescent wrench now let me show you how that's done because it's a little bit tricky if you put your crescent wrench on the wrong knuckles you'll make a mess and that hinge will be leaf bound immediately if you leave the pin in the and ooh chances are the hinge is gonna end up being leaf bound to because you just want to bend the knuckles that are attached to the door you never want to bend the knuckles that are attached to the jamb let's look at that real close when I want to squeeze a hinge the first thing I do is that drive the pin up so it's just the top two knuckles now you can use a nail set to do this you can use a putty knife you can take a putty hide I'm sticking it right in between the pin and the hinge give it a smack it'll separate them and drive the pin up there are so many different ways to remove pins there's even a custom tool they make to do that they also make a tool for squeezing hinges but I've never found one that works on every single hinge so I drive this pin up until it's just engaged the top two knuckles I don't want to engage in any of these knuckles down here and since we're looking down here notice that this leaf that's attached to the door has three knuckles on it the leaf that's attached the jamb has two knuckles I want to bend the leaf that's attached to the door and when I do I want to bend it in this direction I know I know I know it doesn't make any sense it's like cutting crown molding upside down and backwards but think about this when you're squeezing a hinge I mean that's not what we want to do to this door first of all we want to spread this hinge for this door I just want to show you how to squeeze a hinge first before we spread it when you're squeezing a hinge you want to bend the knuckles in this direction toward the strike side so that when you put the pin back in and engage both knuckles you'll be actually drawing the whole door back toward the hinge jamb and that is what's squeezing the hinge is all about moving the door from the strike side to the hinge side so I take my crescent wrench tighten it up on the barrel attached to the door and I give it a tweak now this top one is a little bit tough to bend because the pin is engaging the top two knuckles but when I come down to the next knuckle a center knuckle it bends real easy and then all I have to do is bend this last one and bend it real careful cuz it'll Bend easier than anything because there's no metal on the bottom side of it then you'll notice now that this knuckle right here is no longer flush its proud of this knuckle here and this one's proud of this knuckle so when I Drive my pin back in it'll straighten up that whole hinge as it comes down through these knuckles it's pulling the hinge back the game's on the door back toward the gym so if you have too big of a gap on the huge side you can squeeze your hinge and move the door back toward the hinge side in other words if you have too tight of a gap on the stripe side you can squeeze your hinge and move the door back toward the hinge jamb but that's not what we want to do here I've closed up this gap right here which is exactly what we don't want to do we want to open that gap on this door so to spread a hinge you're gonna open up the door and use your nail set we'll go around the other side and I'll show you what I mean now do this really gently if you do this too hard you'll rip the hinge screws right out the back of the door on a hollow core door for sure or you'll rip them right out of the jam either way you'll have a mess on your hands but that will move the door away from the hinge jamb toward the strike jamb which is exactly what we have to do with this door especially since we squeeze that hinge when we didn't need to what we really need to do is spread that bottom hinge a lot more so here at the bottom hinge I'm going to do the same thing I'll put my nail set up against the barrel of the hinge and then I'll pull that door against that nail set and I'll do it like in three different places I'm giving it a pretty good tug there and I'm slowly moving that door right over to the strike jam a little bit at a time there we go so let's see what this thing looks like now look at this now we got a nice consistent gap beneath the bottom hinge and before there was our leaning gap there at all the door was almost jamb bound so up at the top here by spreading this hinge after we squeezed it first then we spread it we increased this gap just a little bit and by spreading the bottom hinge we've actually straightened this gap up considerably it's almost even across the top of the door now and this gap here is a little bit tighter than it was but we could still spread this hinge a little bit more bring the door over toward this jamb a bit more and spread the bottom hinge to just a tiny bit more just to lift up the top of the door on the strike side so that should teach you something and we're really important about adjusting and bending hinges not just you know the difference between the squeeze with a crescent wrench and the spread with the nail set but even more importantly how to do this very very gently and slowly don't try to make huge Corrections right out the gate because if you do you're gonna yank screws out or something and make a mess to be harder to clean up the mess and besides you want to move the door slowly so you can adjust it into exactly the right position if you want to learn more about hanging doors and I mean setting pre Hong's and hanging doors from scratch check out the door hangers DVD there's a link to it right below on the YouTube channel and before you leave please subscribe to the YouTube channel getting old I need all the support I can get

Channel: THISisCarpentry

Views: 1,025,444

Rating: 4.8694377 out of 5

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Id: 48fFtKTGTEw

Length: 13min 16sec (796 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019