Hinge Hardware Holes on Doors & Gables

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Daren LaBranche
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Hinge Hardware Holes on Doors & Gables

Post by Daren LaBranche »

Up until now, I've always ordered my doors from a supplier & drilled them for hinges manually. So I've always used a hinge hole pattern than contained both the the hinge (door holes) & the mounting plate (gable holes). EC would show me the location of the holes on the doors & gables, but of course only machine the gables. But I'm now processing a large order with plywood doors (in-house) & I have a few concerns.

1) I would like to machine the hinge holes on the doors while they are being cut, but I think this will cause me grief when I run them through my edgebander (the guide rollers for the top & bottom trimmers follow the surface so I'm concerned it will trim down into the door surface when it passes the hardware holes). It already does this when I edge the top/bottom edge of a wall gable that has a 1/2" wide rabbet in it for the back. I suppose I could fill the holes with a flush-fitting plug, but since I have to get this order finished ASAP, I think I'll just machine the doors manually after they've been cut & edged.

2) I use the hardware hinge hole pattern in all my cabs w/all door types (in-house or bought) to reference their locations in the LDE (where I create my shop drawings). Given my decision in the step above for this job, I only want to machine the mounting plate holes in the gables.

3) In the future, I will separate the hinge hardware hole patterns for doors & gables into 2 separate HHE files so that my library cabs have individual hole patterns assigned to the hinge & plate separately. This should allow me to leave the door holes turned on while doing my shop drawings, but be able to turn them off in a batch order (with a global item mod) before cutting.

4) For this job I will remove the door hardware hole patterns & add the hinge plate hole patterns to the batch before cutting.

So here's my question: How does a hinge hole pattern that contains gable machining affect a plate hole pattern on the same cab at the same location? Does the CNC machine the same hole twice? Is it ignored because it somehow knows it has already been machined?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
Daren
Daren LaBranche
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Re: Hinge Hardware Holes on Doors & Gables

Post by Daren LaBranche »

Oddly, if I apply the hinge hole ptn (door only) after I have applied the plate hole ptn (gable only), the gable holes are removed, and they do not return even if I re-add them. The only way to get both to display together seems to be to have all the holes in the hinge hole ptn.
Ralph Balanik
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Re: Hinge Hardware Holes on Doors & Gables

Post by Ralph Balanik »

Hi Darren,
I do about the same as you. I did have issues with edgebanding when I drilled slab doors so I thought I would modify a hinge pattern, which also applies mounting plate holes, so it would simply mark the hinge cup center location. This was to make it easier to do manual drilling. I created another issue with this. I use the new textured melamines for making lower cost cabinets and It would create the mark just fine but after edgebanding sometimes there might be a scatch or some other problem on the face side. I could have salvaged the door in some cases by simply turning the back side out, but with location marks, I ended up with marks on both faces. With the exception of tall doors for pantries all other doors are hinged an equal distance from either end so for the most part locating hinges manually is simple enough. I took the hinge hole pattern and removed the hinge cup holes completely, renamed the hinge pattern " cruciform mounting plate " . I have no problem with my case ends being drilled for mounting plates and I leave cup holes or locations out of the maching portion of the job completely.
Daren LaBranche
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Re: Hinge Hardware Holes on Doors & Gables

Post by Daren LaBranche »

That's a good point Ralph about keeping both faces untouched until after checking them. More options are always better....Thanks.

BTW: I think this is how I'm going to handle this hardware hole pattern issue with in-house built doors.

1) Apply a hinge hole ptn to the doors to make my shop dwgs & check dims.

2) Apply a hinge mount hole ptn to the doors also (even though it doesn't show up & is redundant when the hinge ptn is applied).

3) Remove the hinge hole ptn with a global mod when I batch the job. This will leave only the hinge mount hole ptn to be machined into the gables.
Neville Bastian
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Re: Hinge Hardware Holes on Doors & Gables

Post by Neville Bastian »

Hi Guys, As a different view on drilling the doors I would suggest you think about. How many doors per job need rotating? How much time does it take to drill the hinges manually? Can measurement mistakes be made at the drilling stage? Can doors be scratched at this second handling stage? Sometimes the cost of the door or doors does not equal out the minutes lost on hinge drilling. Also by drilling manually that means you are drilling the handles manually. Another area that takes forever and prone to tear outs at the back and wrong positioning. Its a bit hard to open a door on the hinge side but some people have tried to make this work.
My melamine doors I use the Thermwood but for MDF patterned doors I am forced to drill manually due to my software. I have a foot in both camps.

Regards

Neville
Neville Australia
Daren LaBranche
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Re: Hinge Hardware Holes on Doors & Gables

Post by Daren LaBranche »

I should clarify my item #1 below: This hinge hole ptn has holes in both the door & gable.

Hey Neville, I hear what you're saying, but I believe that it's best suited to high-volume shops to simply throw away a piece & keep cutting because material is cheap. And my clients typically don't pick their handles (let alone their locations) until the day I start installing, so predrilling those is out of the question for me.

But I agree with Ralph; keep your options open, even if it means a little manual work (something that I think allot of people these days think that money & CNCs should eliminate). There's always something unexpected going to happen, like a scratch on the good side of a sheet that you double-checked before cutting, & when it does, it's nice to have the option of simply using the other side (hopefully it's good).

Besides, if I standardize the hinge hole locations on my doors (equal from top & bottom), the time savings between the CNC doing it & me doing it are minimal. Heck, I might even drill doors while the CNC is cutting other parts!
Ralph Balanik
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Re: Hinge Hardware Holes on Doors & Gables

Post by Ralph Balanik »

Good morning,
More thoughts on this. If I ruin a door whether by edge banding, or handling, I have to recut. The time it takes when in the middle of a job to place a sheet , recut the part, turn on the edge bander and wait for warmup time, do the edgebanding, and hope I don't have to do that again, is almost as much time as it takes to drill all the doors manually on smaller projects. I try these days to do it right the first time, at least as often as possible, because that is less time than it takes to do it twice. :D
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