Fancy Hinges

Used with a degree of care fixtures and fittings can really accentuate a piece. Historically this is quite common, nowadays hardware looks to have taken a minimal, understated approach. This piece however called for something a little different.

Embrace was never designed with commercial hinges in mind, making my own really was the only viable option. The design process for these was a fairly simple one - function and fit eliminated most variables so I spent half an hour sketching ending up with a shape that echoed the cabinets form.

The black entity above is a piece of 3mm brass plate, black because it's coated with permanent marker. As such a scribed line will look nice 'n' bright. Each leaf is marked around the copper template leaving space for a saw kerf.

Annealing. The idea is to heat the brass to a dull red (I know that isn't 'dull' red, I got rather distracted taking the photo!) followed by cold quenching, this realigns the molecular structure making brass softer, more pliable and generally easier to work. Why bother? because next......

....comes the Planishing. When you repeatedly hammer brass it 'work hardens', this makes the metal hard and brittle, thus difficult to work. Here we see Candice, head of Jewellery showing me the ropes.

Although these look quite rough they match the cabinets inside contours near perfectly. 

As usual time was an issue, forcing me to cannibalise shop brought hinges. For a special job like this making everything in-house is preferable, that way I have ultimate control (cue evil laugh) over quality, fit and finish. These knuckles are milled to tight tolerances from solid brass rather than rolled or extruded, a suitable alternative. The scribed lines were taken directly from each leaf.

After a careful filing job matching the parts up, the mating faces were made squeaky clean ready for silver soldering, this is very important - when heated the flux will suck in any contaminants, resulting in a weaker/unsightly joint line.

An Oxygen - Acetylene torch is perfect for this job, pin pointing heat distribution through the parts to control the solders flow. Worst case scenario: solder gets drawn into the knuckle. That my friends would have been very bad news indeed.

To iron out the dinks I used a curved engineers scraper. The principle is similar to using a cabinet scraper, though more time consuming.

Screw placement. It was always going to be a trade off between holding power and aesthetics. Four is my favourite, the open space in the centre looks very clean. However looks won't matter all that much if the door falls off! Three is a good compromise. The screws are tiny, 3/8" x 2G.

Marked, drilled, countersunk and polished! The edges have been slightly rounded over, as have the recesses in which they sit to add definition. I later re-cut the countersinks: they weren't up to par.

*Bling*