Dice Towers Continued

Yesterday was spent fitting the “frame” of the tower to the table itself:

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And cutting mortises for hinges. The dice towers are going to be hinged in two places:

Each using a pair of hinges. I went with Brusso CB-301 hinges for all of them. The hinge needs a 3/4” long x 13/32” wide x 3/32” deep mortise. Trying to hold one of these tiny hinges against the wood and trace around it is near impossible. But a marking gauge makes it easy. Set the cutter to the the dimension you need by referencing the hinge itself, then transfer that to the board:

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After some chisel work we’ve got a perfect pocket for the hinge:

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About Hinges

Something to note about hinges: there are two ways you can mount them. You can make them flush the surface and have the barrel (the round edge of the hinge containing the pin) completely exposed. When closed the two halves sit together nicely, but when you open them there will be a small gap between the two pieces. You can see that here in my tool chest:

If you’re doing big doors like this that’s totally fine. But if you want the two halves to rotate perfectly on their corners and have no gap, you need to mortise the hinge a little deeper than normal so that the rotation point of the two halves is the center of the hinge pin:

And to do that you just need to make sure you’re setting the marking gauge to that point at the center of the pin, not just to the size of the hinge leaf itself. Now the two rotate exactly on their corners: