While gluing up the tool cabinet, I noticed that the joint that wasn’t closing up properly was probably just cut too much. So rather than having to look at a hideous gap in the miter there, I cheated and glued in a little piece of scrap:

After trimming the face, it looked like this, which is probably good enough for me not to notice all of the time:

Hopefully, I’ve got enough practice at this now so that I don’t make this mistake again.

So after the carcase was together, I had to hang the doors. As I noted in my previous post, I’ve never done this before, so I thought it might be a good idea to practice. The Korn book explains how to do it fairly well, so I went through the motions and came up with this:

I’m glad I did a practice joint first, because I didn’t really have a solid picture of how the hinge fit into the mortise relative to the pin and how far the hinge would open. But after doing it, things really became clear. I now also have a better appreciation of the butt hinge and its versatility.

I didn’t take photos of how I made the above test because I felt a little tepid while making it. However, I did photograph the process on the tool cabinet. First, I figured out where the hinges were to go. I decided that I wanted three hinges per door to give it enough strength. Then I looked around at a bunch of doors around the house and looked at the proportions of the hinge placement. I didn’t come up with a formula (next time, maybe), but I determined that two inches from the inside “would not look sucky,” so that’s what I came up with.

To make sure that I didn’t cut a mortise in the wrong place (a favorite habit of mine), I first penciled on a little mark where one would go. Then, after making sure that those marks were actually correct, I scribed in the precise marks:

I used the little Lee Valley miniature marking gauge for the depth and height. The depth was set to the width of the hinge leaf, up to just a little bit shy of the center of the hinge pin–I really should have taken a photo of this. I set the height with the other end of the gauge, to a bit more than the leaf thickness. To get the ends, I scribed the near one first, then scribed the other by placing the hinge in place.

Then I knocked out most of the waste with a chisel. You can do the whole thing with a chisel, but I wasn’t feeling all that precise, so I grabbed my little miniature routing plane to go the bottom:

It seemed to turn out fairly well:

I completed all of the mortises for the inside, then I turned to the door. Again, I carefully penciled in the sides where the hinges were supposed to go. Then I wedged the door in place at a particular spot, and marked the mortise ends from the ones that I’d just made. This is a very similar technique to marking dovetails.

I didn’t have as much registration surface for the router plane on the edge of the door as I had on the carcase frame, so I clamped a couple pieces of scrap to the sides to give me more. This made it an easier job than the frame:

To drill the holes for the hinge screws, I eyed them with an awl. (Nope, I don’t have a center punch yet.)

After drilling the holes, I put in all of the screws, put the cleat on the back, and hung it on the wall. It looked like a cabinet:

There were a few little flubs–for example, I didn’t trust my lines in the mortises enough, and that was a mistake. Fortunately, it didn’t make enough of a difference to matter in the end, and what’s also fortunate is that I hopefully won’t make those errors again.

So it was on the wall, but didn’t have any tools yet. I fixed that yesterday, when I made a little bracket for my Taiwanese planes and added my Veritas low-angle block plane:

So the cabinet is now 1/6th full. I have to make little attachments for the other tools on the inside and the doors.

I’ll do that eventually. I have to get started on other projects now. Between the move and all of the other things that were going on in the past four months (which seemed like an eternity), there were times when I felt like I was trying to nail jelly to a tree. This project felt like it took forever. In reality, it was maybe half that, but I don’t want to have that feeling again.