Installing Inset Hinges: Part 3 – install the Door and Adjust

Video Transcript

All right, we're back for the second half of our video, here. We're going to show you what else we've done, and how to snap the door on. You recall, in the bag, there's a little, angled piece of metal stopper that's going to allow the door to rest against that. We can come in here and take a look at this.

What we have is, we put a screw in here, and the set-back on this little metal piece is the thickness of that door bumper. We want the door to be dead level with the front frame, so if this piece is up tight next to the front frame, the door's going to be proud of the front frame. We push it back just the thickness of that plastic bumper, and then our little bumper goes in the front. It goes on the opposite side of the hinge; our hinge snaps on over here, the bumper goes on the opposite side.
Typically, you want the bumper on wall cabinets to be at the top, so you don't have plates and things running into that if it was at the bottom. On base cabinets, you may have to mount it to the floor; or on the middle rail between a drawer box and a door at the bottom; you have to put a block there to mount that to. Otherwise, you can put it at the floor of the cabinet.

Now what happens is, you can see how hard this would be to get inside the cabinet and run those screws in behind. It's just a real bear, your screwdriver's hitting the back. It's much nicer to put that front frame down on a finished work surface, get the brackets put on, and then put your cabinet together. Now, it's as simple as taking our door, with our hinges already mounted. If the camera guy can come over this side, so you can see what I'm doing.

There's a little arm right here, a little rod. That little rod is going to tuck into that little slot. We're going to do the top one first. It tucks in there, and it snaps in place. The bottom one does the same thing, snaps in place; and our door is now mounted, slick as you please. The door is dead level with the surface of the cabinet, and now we can go back and adjust. You may need to dial in your gap, because this gap right now is too big, it's almost tight over here. These hinges are six-way adjustable, so we get the door open, which is going to be a problem. You might want to put a piece of tape on the door edge, so you can get your inset doors open.

What we're going to do now is adjust the hinges, just to show you how that works. Phillips head screwdriver, you have six ways of adjustment. I'm not sure if you can get in there and see that, Mr. Cameraman, but we have a in/out adjustment; an up/down adjustment, which is inside that hole; and a left/right adjustment. We'll show you how this works.

The first screw, you turn that one, and it's going to go ... It's going this way, the door's going this way, so that's how we would adjust the gap left to right. We already know my gap on the left side was too big, so I'm going to push the hinge in. I'm going to screw it in a couple of turns. Okay. We have tried to dial in a better gap. We can see the gap here and here is now about equal.
We're almost touching down here, we have a gap up here; so now I have to go up. We're going to go in here; the up/down adjustment is inside the hole. We're going to rotate the screw ... I'm not sure if you can see that, but the hinge arm is going up and down. We're going to go up on both hinge arms, and now we have the desired gap at the top. I actually went a little too far; it's a little too big at the bottom, so we're going to go back in there and go the opposite direction. Now we want to go clockwise, and that will push the hinge arm down a little bit. Okay. That's going to give us a nice gap.

We may have an issue where we want to go in/out, so if your door is not flush, it's sitting out too much or too far in, that's the rear screw. As I turn that one, the whole door is sliding into the cabinet or out of the cabinet, so you can dial in how flush your door is to the face frame with those in/out adjustments.

With inside cabinetry, you will find you have to do this periodically, until the doors settle into an equilibrium with the climate. You'll have to go through a couple of heating and cooling seasons in your home, high moisture, low moisture. The doors will finally find an equilibrium, but you might have to dial in that adjustment periodically over the life of the inset cabinets; they're a little more high maintenance than overlay, but you do get a look you just can't get any way else. It's a terrific look.

If you have any questions about how to do this, feel free to give us a call at the customer service number, 888-211-6482, and we can guide you through it.