Wood Hinge for boxes with Rob Cosman

hi I'm Rob Kaufman welcome to my shop several years ago back when YouTube was just a baby the company that I hired to produce my instructional videos put the trailers of several of them on YouTube and the trailer for the one called the would hinge box was really brief and I've had lots of complaints over the years that it didn't tell you how to do it well it wasn't intended to tell you everything but I want to go through this today and show you a little bit more about this so you have a better grasp grasp of exactly how this works so if you haven't seen it before I'll show you some examples what we do is we make a hinge using a wooden dowel so that when it goes together it disappears until you open it and then you start to see all the joints now this one I made using figured maple here's one that's made using bird's-eye maple it's really cool when you look at it from the backside and there's nothing there and then all of a sudden there is very strong if you think of all the contact surface here and then you can get much simpler this is just three piece little business card boxes that I make here's a different variation where you actually leave the dowel on the surface so you have half of it showing and you don't see any joints at all but it's just a variation and then I've used it on furniture I've used it on big chests this time I actually left it I left two dowels apart my left two dovetails proud I also left the hinge proud so open it you'll see what I mean right and you can do the spacing whatever you want so let me go through and show you a little bit I've got a box here that's only Parsley's assembled you build a box and in this video by the way which is now available for download and I'll explain to that in a second but in the video I show you how to cut this joint I used to when I first started doing this I used to do them all with hand-cut dovetails and a box like that might take me four or five hours to build however I found that when selling them in galleries that the public really didn't care or didn't know so I made a jig and that's all in the video on how to make a box joint where you a wide tail and a narrow pin to kind of mimic what would otherwise be a dovetail and I could get a box like this done in less than an hour so once you've built your box and there's some steps that you have to go through before you build it in fact you have to cut this groove in this piece before you assemble the box but that groove which is half of a quarter half of a that's not half sexy more than half but it's a quarter inch in diameter and you use with something called a core box bit so this is a router bit that is designed to cut a half round and the trick is finding one that actually gives you a true half round sometimes they're a little bit flat on the bottom and they can be pointed so you've got to experiment a little bit and I can't really even recommend a brand because I've seen two very from within the same company within the same brand so you cut a portion of a quarter inch in this case a quarter-inch circle on the bottom and then you cut a portion in the top so you can see it better when you look at the profile now you have to put more than a quarter of the circle in each piece other words when you when you flush it off you would end up exposing the pivot pin so before I go any further with this let me show you what the pivot pin is all about so I make my own dowel and I explain that in the video as well because you want to be able to match the species and the idea is to make the dowel disappear into the back of the box so if I was building a walnut box all beside one wall I put one on a dowel and I I made a jig it's not a very pretty one but it works effectively and you can adjust it to within a thousandth of an inch because you want this to be perfectly matched to two things the dowel that you are the bit that you're using to cut the half round circle and you match it by simply cutting a groove with that bit and then setting your dowel in there and making sure that it makes contact all the way around in fact I prefer to cut and you know plow through a piece of wood where you leave a half a circle set your dowel in there to make sure that it literally seats and is making contact on the entire surface area and then I invented this little jig several years ago back in the university days which would've been in the late 80s and you put this in a cordless drill or anything that will spin it it has a quarter inch hole it has a sixteenth inch bit that is held in place so while this is spinning in the drill you take your segment of dowel and you simply stick it in the hole and then as you continue to push it in it makes contact with the drill bit and you end up with a hole that is board directly on Center only 1/16 inch in diameter if you try to do it any other way the built that little drill bit will tend to wander sixteenth inch drill bit doesn't have a lot of mass so it'll follow the path of least resistance unless it's held in place like this so I would take my box and I always do this in an odd number because you want the hinge to be to look balanced so you're you're going to head if it was three pieces you'd have two pieces that would be end up being glued to the base and one glued to the top if you're going to go five you're going to have a piece glued to the base then a piece glued to the top then the middle piece to the base next piece to the top final piece to the base it just looks nice and balances the word I can think of as opposed having it uneven or pardon me an even number which would leave it looking a little bit weird so once I've done that spacing I have a little bench hook this is what we call a device that's designed to be used with a hand saw to cut off piece of timber but I've taken my bit and I plow to groove all the way through and then I made it such so that when I put that piece of dowel in there locked in place and come in with my hand side now these are hand sized that I make myself and this is a crosscut saw which has very little set so it gives you a nice clean cut now I used to do them on the table saw but the problem with cutting on the table side is you're removing quite a bit more material in between each cut which takes away from that continuity of having the grain flow all the way through the dowel this way you're only losing exactly twenty four thousands of an inch so I hold it with my thumb I've put a little slot in here so that the cut is guaranteed to be square and because the dowel sits in a half round groove it prevents one half of it from having any splintering it does a pretty good job actually then you would cut all those pieces then as I said this would turn around and be put in the in a cordless drill ax I said show you can you set that down for just a second okay when we have these made there's a little set screw on either side one here one there and I'll just loosen this up so you can see everything about it so there's my drill bit just a standard sixteenth inch drill bit goes into there now I don't want that hole to be very deep so I've got little exit holes right here on either side for the sawdust to get out but I want that to be oh maybe an eighth of an inch now put that back in you don't have to make these super tight they're just there to prevent in fact if you do make them super tight you'll snap the drill bit yeah this is just here to prevent it from turning okay now check this up in your put the drill press you can put it in a lathe this is just as easy and then while that is spinning you're going to stick this in the end bottoms out and bring it out now you've got a perfect sixteenth inch diameter hole dead center it has to be dead center else.the it won't it won't pivot properly now the next thing I do is I use sixteenth inch welding rod and I've got some of that ticking around here somewhere shift it up down again please I'm not a welder but this stuff is referred to I bought this at a place called princess Auto which is just a automotive supply it's one sixteenth inch diameter by 36 inches I got enough here to relax the rest of my life and I don't know if those numbers mean anything to you or not you can have a look at them so it's not the kind of welding rod that has a coating on it so there's what it looks like I'll just cut a piece off and make it a little easier to handle you want it to be fairly hard if it's soft when you pinch it like that it will squeeze and deform it and it's not going to work very well so I do I like to have it fairly brittle and then I just simply put that in the hole let it bottom right out and then once I know how much it needs to go into the other piece then I'll just come in there and click that off so you end up putting your dowel all together all the pieces in place then you come back to this now let me show you if you don't have the center of your hole far enough into the box then when it comes time to flatten this off you'd expose the pivot pin so as you can see I'm well within the outside edge of the box plus you want much material as possible on this side of the pin just to strengthen it so you assemble your dowel it's all put into pieces all I'll put together and then I mark the position of the joints on the bottom as you can see I've done it on the bottom of each piece now these have to be glued in place and the whole thing has to be done at once that means that if I'm going to glue here and I'm going to glue here and I'm going to glue here I'm going to glue the opposite pieces on the lid meaning I'm going to glue this section and we're going to glue that section and glue the such that under pressure it's going to it's going to migrate and if it does migrate it may very well go over and seize the part that should be free moving so the first thing I do is I take a q-tip and I come in and I wax right here along this line and I wax all of this surface right over to this line any kind of wax actually paste wax I do the same thing over here don't get on to this part because you want that to be able to be glued but you don't want any glue over here so this entire surface and this entire surface get waxed on the top actually you know what this number these things don't line up but I don't know why must be using for demonstration you just need to know that up here you're going to do the opposite you're going to wax where you aren't going to glue then you put your glue in and again I use a q-tip and not too much glue just just enough and then put the whole thing together clamp it in this case I usually I like to put a block of wood that will cover the whole surface and then clamp it like so wait for the glue to dry next thing I do is I flush off the back whether you do with a hand plane or whether you do with a sander and then if you're lucky and you did everything right it'll open up work perfectly I've had some of these boxes kicking around my house for Oh since way back in the in the 80s and they're still they are just ding but they haven't been broken haven't coming apart so it's a very strong joint anyway if that interests you and of course you can finish them anywhere you want just so you have variations on the joint this is the Box joint that I talk this is a hand-cut dovetail it's all done with a handsaw and a chisel these ones are just playing around what I did is I took my dovetail saw and I drew out the dovetail after I my first mitered the pieces together and glued them that's not a very strong joint so it has to have some reinforcement and I held the box in the vise like so I drew my dovetails and then I made sock cuts on the lines stopped at the base line and then I took really thin veneer in this case ebony veneer and I slid it down into the slot used super glue also called sign acrylate to go in there it goes in by works by capillary action so yeah it wicks a little bit there we'll go through the entire joint and then flush it off and it outlines the dovetail just kind of a different way of doing it it's not really about proof no it isn't it's a miter with splines but it's made to look like a dovetail this one I did using different colored wood this is a piece of mahogany and then again the ebony don't like the joint and there's no I I sell these little jigs on my site if you go to Rob Cosman com we're going to put it you can you can pick up one of these in the video actually show you a way that you can do make a shop made one that will work it'll eventually wear out and it's not quite as accurate you don't have to have this you can do it without it but if you're going to do any number of them you're probably going to want to get a hold of something like this anyway they're available for sale on my website like I said Robert Rob Cosmo calm or just honest my email Rob Cosmo now here's the other exciting news we've recently put all of our DVDs on our site for downloading so if you want do it the old way you can still call in or email and we'll put one in the mail to you but you're paying I don't know 30 some odd dollars for this plus $15 shipping and you got to wait we can have for it to come to you or you can go there and I think they're right around $19 Canadian you can download and have it instantly you can even rent it if you want I think it's five dollars for 48 hours so that will cover everything that we talked about as far as building the box and it'll get you through this in fact I remember when we shot this I I didn't sleep both at night because I thought we might have left some of material out that I wanted to go over better so we went back in the next day and we refilmed some of the building of the jig for doing the the box joint so I think it's pretty thorough if you want to learn how to use a hand plane so that you're not restricted to just using sandpaper if two choices for you here you can restore an old hand plane that you have maybe your grandfather owned it and it'll walk you through the process of making that old plane work far more effectively if you'd rather just go and buy one I went to work with a company called wood crafts and help them develop their plane line they're very inexpensive this one will walk you through everything you need to know from taking it out of the box to sharpening it to using something called a shooting board to make sure your edges are nice and square plane and wide panels regrinding once you've sharpened too many times the whole bit if you want to learn how to cut the dovetails like to do this not something like that this is our latest this one will walk you through the new technique we have which almost makes it foolproof that all of these are available for download if you want more detailed instruction we did that one a few years ago and that one will talk to you about exercise that you can do to strengthen your ability to cut plum and cut on an angle which saw and why the whole bit and chiseling is a very important skill when it comes to woodworking and unfortunately most folks have trouble with post sharpening and and using and the using problem comes from having it not properly sharpened so that'll go through and tell you what to look for when you buy chisels and how to go in there and grind a proper angle and then most importantly how to prepare them and how to sharpen and the sharpening time on the chisel is usually somewhere between 8 to 12 seconds so it doesn't take a long time anyway hope you enjoyed this make some boxes I love doing this you can use pieces of wood that would otherwise be thrown in the garbage because they're so small and turned into something really pretty like that that whether you sell them or they give them your friends they'll be cherished okay enjoy it see ya

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 89,879

Rating: 4.8637991 out of 5

Keywords: woodhinge, wood, woodworking, dovetails, boxes, box joint, rob cosman, hand-cut, cabinetmaking, furniture making, dale nish, vise, how to, wood box, Woodriver

Id: Qr5Ja3Dcggg

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2015