Installing Inset Hinges: Part 1- Measuring for the Brackets

Video Transcript

Today we're going to demonstrate how to upfit inset. We've demonstrated in other videos how the put together overlay cabinets where the door lays over the front frame. Today we're going to take a look at how inset door, where the door sits inside the front frame, how to best fit those up for hinges. There's a couple of differences.

First I want to show you what comes in your hinge pack. It's a little bit different than overly. You have a bracket that mounts to the back of the front frame, which is what we're going to demonstrate momentarily; the actual hinge cups with the arm, which go in the same way our other videos show on the website that tell you how to install those hinges - they go in the same way. There's little door stoppers that mount inside the cabinet the door will rest against. They even send you two little plastic buttons to put on through so the door will softly close against that arm.

What we're going to focus on now is how to put the brackets on the back of the front frame before you assemble the cabinet. We're going to take a look here. I'll take my front frame and my door apart. In other videos we show you how to install the hinge cups in the hinge hole. Set the door off to the side. What you're going to do is working on your clean, dry, unmarred work surface. You don't want any debris on there because you're going to take the front frame and flip it upside down.

Now there's a little bit of math involved here. What we know is that the doors, the hinge hole, is 3" to the center of the cup. On every door Conestoga does, unless you ask for special boring, it's 3" to the center of the cup. We also know we want about a 3/32" gap between the door and the front frame, so let's just call it 3-1/8. We're going to take our pencil, and picking which side of the frame we want to hinge it on we're going to measure up 3 and just a little under 1/8. We're going to do the same thing up here. We're going to measure 3 and just a little under 1/8. That is now the center line for these brackets.

What we're going to do is take the bracket, and if the camera man can see that, is a little ridge there. That little ridge is what catches your front frame. There's a little hole here that we can see our center line, so we take a look and find our pencil line and make sure we're on center. Then we take our pencil tip and make a mark. We're going to do the same thing on this one.

All right now, we're going to come back in just a moment, but we're going to do is pre-drill with a little tiny drill bit, 1/16" drill bit. We're going to pre-drill those holes and then when we come back on camera here we'll show you how we mount those, and then in a later video or later part of this video we'll show you how the door actually snaps on once the cabinet's built.