Coming Unhinged
I'm building several cabinets for my workshop, based pretty closely on the designs in the "Garage Workshop" episode of Norm Abram's New Yankee Workshop. In the plans, they call for the use of so-called European-style concealed cup hinges. Since I'm making two full base units plus two wall units, there are a total of twelve doors and 24 hinges, so it made sense to also buy Rockler's "Jig-It" jigs for locating the cup hole and the base-plate screws.
Tonight, I finally assembled and tried out the jigs. After a bit of assembly and tweaking to adjust the depth stop on the cup-hole jig, they appeared to work pretty well. I took a couple of plywood scraps out of the bin, marked them as if for hinge locations, and then used the jigs to actually install a hinge.
Imagine my annoyance, then, to discover, after buying and using these specially made jigs so as to achieve precise positioning of the hinge components, that the cup hole is precisely positioned to leave over an eighth of an inch of exposed cabinet side on the hinge side of the door! Since the cabinet plans call for the doors to be wide enough to use up all but a sixteenth of an inch of the cabinet width (i.e., just enough to make a reasonable gap between the doors), this extra offset from the hinge was, shall we say, most unwelcome.
Now I'm going to need to make my own wood block to act as the foundation of the cup-hole jig, so that I can carefully rip it to the correct size to give me the exact-fit overlay I was expecting. What a pain.
And while I'm complaining, why is it that Norm specifies the use of fancy under-mount hidden drawer slides, at $37 per pair, for cabinets that are made to go into your garage workshop, fercrissakes?! Rockler sells some perfectly acceptable side-mount slides with the same weight rating for only $17 a pair...