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Bending Hinges to Adjust Doors

Jun 01, 2021
Here's something I know for a fact: the older you get, the more you tend to repeat yourself, and I know I'm going to repeat myself about how to make

hinges

because I have this vague memory of demonstrating how to bend

hinges

in my first book. The door hanger manual in my second book Finished Woodworking 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 could have published an article about it, even God, I think I have. We've probably covered this same material five or six times, but the great thing about Instagram is that there are a ton of people who have never read any of it and here's an opportunity for all of you to get it directly from the Schaffer brothers because that's where I I learned how to do this and it's pretty simple, first let's take a look at this door.
bending hinges to adjust doors
It's fine here, but when you look through the top of the door, it gets bigger and bigger in the right year. Oh my god, I can do it. to cure my key here, so it's too big, look down, this space is too narrow, that door is almost stuck, there's probably only about a sixteenth of an inch there, so it would be nice if we could extend this hinge. and move the door further away from the jamb right here, the gap on the striker side at the bottom of the jamb here is even larger than at the top.
bending hinges to adjust doors

More Interesting Facts About,

bending hinges to adjust doors...

You could probably fit two keys in there, so if we extend that hinge there and then move the door in this direction away from the hinge jamb towards the lock jamb, that will also make this space smaller. Now this gap here, which is too big, we can

adjust

it by extending the hinge at the top of the door, so what did we do? Simply put, we look at the whole picture, there are two ways to bend hinges: tighten and extend. I'll show you both in just a second, but before you can do either, you need to look at the full picture because a door is a rectangle inside the jamb rectangle and you want to be able to move the door rectangle inside the rectangle of a jamb and you have to keep it in points to do it from the bottom hinge and the top hinge you can extend them or you can tighten them, that means if I take that hinge over there and extend it and move this door down with the bottom near the jamb of the lock, will also lift the top of the door, the head. of the door and closer to the head jam, which in this case is amazing now, if there wasn't a lot of space between the top of the door and the head jam on the striker side, it might not be such a good thing because If I reach out wide and close this gap and there's no gap above the door on the jet on the ted jam on the strike side, so the top of the door will probably start rubbing them on the head jamb, so You have to look at the whole picture before

bending

the hinges.
bending hinges to adjust doors
Here's a stacked hinge I just pulled out of my cabinet. Yes, they are a little old. I've had them for a while, but I'll be putting out a box now. let's open it up this is new there are the screws here are the screws here it is he's still wrapped in plastic let's take the plastic off of both so we can take a good look at these things this hinge was a little funny people think they're identical to each other and you really take them out of the box and they learn everything. I learned this end shaper from Boyle and it's something we all need to learn how to work with the hinges because one of them goes and they're actually both bent a little bit, this one has the boot right here or the blade is bent at the knuckle of each one of these knuckles, look at this and you'll see what I mean, this hinge is bent right there, that's the boot and the hinge, if there wasn't a boot on the hinge, then the blades would touch each other and the hinge would be held together by the hinge or the sash, so let's look at this by looking at the distance between the two sashes, right?
bending hinges to adjust doors
I'm 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 space between the blade on this, this is cool, look at this, you look between these two ears and there's almost no space in Maybe you can stick a piece of paper in there and that's it, so this hinge will separate the door a little further from the jamb than this hinge, so if this was the top hinge you would have a bigger gap between the door and the jamb, then you would be at the bottom hinge of this hinge.
I hope you understand what I'm talking about. This means that not always, but quite often, you need to make minor

adjust

ments to the hinges to make sure the gaps are equal and consistent throughout the door, especially on the hinge side, so here's how it's done. There are two ways to adjust the hinge. One is by extending it and extends the hinge once it is attached to the door jamb with a set of nails. I just take my set of nails, I stick it just inside the hinge and I push it hard against the hinge cylinder and then I close the door gently in two or three places and that way the space between the two leaves opens that does not I don't want to do this with a shiny brass hinge or a smooth brass hinge because it will leave a big dent.
If you want to open a hinge like that guy's, you can use maybe a block of wood or the back end of a shim, but even that probably wouldn't work as well, you'd most likely have to take those hinges out and shim them between the jamb and the back of the hinge or between the back of the door hinge with a piece of flank. laminate or something like that, little by little until you separate the door from the jamb a little more, that's the extension, then you just have to tighten, tightening is also quite simple. I use a wrench for this, I take the wrench and I put it on the knuckle right there and I bend the hinge by pulling the line with a wrench.
Now let me show you how it's done because it's a little tricky if you put the wrench on the wrong knuckles you'll make a mess. and that hinge will be attached to the sash immediately if you leave the pin on it and ooh, the hinge will probably end up being attached to the sash because you only want to bend the knuckles that are attached to the door and you never want to bend the knuckles. that are attached to the jamb, let's look at that closely when I want to tighten a hinge, the first thing I do is push the pin up so that only the top two knuckles are left.
Now you can use a set of nails to do this. a spatula, you can take a skin of putty. I'm gluing it right between the pin and the hinge, give it a tap, it will separate them and drive the pin up. There are many different ways to remove the pins, there is even a custom tool. To do that they also make a hinge tightening tool, but I've never found one that works on each and every hinge, so I drive this pin up until it engages with the top two knuckles. I don't want to hook any of these knuckles down here and as we're looking down here we notice that this sash that's attached to the door has three knuckles the sash that's attached to the jamb has two knuckles I want to bend the sash 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 backwards and forwards, but think about this when you tighten a hinge. I mean, that's not what we want to do. to this door first of all we want to extend this hinge for this door I just want to show you how to tighten a hinge first before you extend it when you're tightening a hinge you want to bend your knuckles in this direction towards the strike side so that when you replace the pin and engage both knuckles, you will actually be dragging the entire door towards the hinge jamb and that is what tightens the hinge, it is all about moving the door from the strike side to the hinge side, so I take my wrench, I squeeze it into the cylinder attached to the door and give it a tightening.
Now this one on top is a little difficult to bend because the pin catches on the top two knuckles, but when I go down to the next knuckle one middle knuckle bends very easily and then all I have to do is bend this last one and bend it very much be careful because it will bend easier than anything else because there is no metal on the bottom, so you will notice that this knuckle here is no longer flush, it is proud of this knuckle here and this one is proud of this knuckle, so when I put my pin back in, it will straighten the entire hinge as it goes down through these knuckles and pull the hinge back. on the door back to the gym, so if you have too big a gap on the large side, you can tighten the hinge and move the door to the hinge side;
In other words, if you have too tight a gap on the side of the scuff, you can squeeze the hinge and move the door toward the hinge jamb, but that's not what we want to do here. I've closed this space right here, which is exactly what we don't want to do. We want to open that space on this. door, so to extend a hinge, you will open the door and use your nail set. We'll go the other way and I'll show you what I mean. Now do this very carefully. If you do it too hard, safely remove the hinge screws from the back of the door on a hollow core door or you will get them 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 towards the closing jamb, which is exactly what we need to do with this door, especially since we tighten that hinge when we don't need it, what we really need to do is extend the bottom hinge much further, so here, on the hinge bottom, I'm going to do the same. I'll put my nail against the hinge cylinder and then I'll pull that door against that set of nails and I'll do it in like three different places. a pretty good pull there and I'm slowly moving that door towards the jam little by little, there we go, so let's see what this looks like now, look at this, now we have a nice consistent space under the bottom. hinge and before our slant gap existed there, the door was almost attached to the jamb, so up at the top here by extending this hinge after we tightened it first and then extended it, we increased this gap just a little bit and by extending the bottom hinge We've actually straightened this gap considerably, it's now almost level at the top of the door and this gap here is a little bit narrower than it was, but we could still extend this hinge a little bit more and bring it closer the door towards this jamb. a little more and extend the bottom hinge a little more just to lift the top of the door on the strike side, that should teach you something and we are very important when it comes to adjusting and

bending

the hinges, not only you know the difference between tightening with a wrench and spreading with the nail set, but even more importantly, how to do this very, very gently and slowly, don't try to make big corrections from the beginning because if you do, you'll rip out screws or something and make a mess so that it is more difficult to clean up the mess and also you have to move the door slowly so that you can adjust it exactly in the right position if you want to learn more about hanging

doors

and I mean setting up pre Hong and hanging

doors

. from scratch, check out the door hanger DVD.
There is a link just below on the YouTube channel and before you go, please subscribe to the YouTube channel. Getting older, I need all the support I can get.

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