Hinge Mortises for Dummy Carpenters (Carpentry Week 4)

Butt hinge in a mortise

Here at the Antisocial Network, we believe that education is an important part of instruction: in other words, besides telling someone how to perform a task, tell him what he's doing at the same time. Apparently, eHow.com's Elizabeth Knoll doesn't think that second part is necessary, because in her post titled "How to Carve Out for Hinges on a Wooden Door"¹ she never once uses the word "mortise." We think it's probably because she doesn't know what the word means... and that she also has no idea what she's talking about in the first place. In fact, we already knew that...

We realized it this time because Knoll drops several hints in her content that make it clear she's bullshitting her readers. One such hint appears in her introduction, when she tells people that

"Door hinges need to be slightly depressed into the edge of the door so that the door can close with ease."

Right off the bat she's wrong: doors whose hinges aren't mortised into the jamb open and close just as easily as those whose hinges are mortised, but they look like hell and leave a wide gap on the hinge side of the door. That is why hinges are mortised... errr, "depressed." And not all hinges fit into mortises, anyway -- just the type known as butt hinges.

Liz's other "instructions" leave little doubt that she just found instructions somewhere and reworded them -- since what she says is incomplete or misleading. Take, for instance, "Measure the hinge edge of your door 5 inches down from the top, and 10 inches up from the bottom....Hold the top hinge on the edge of the door at the upper pencil mark..." Wait: "hold it at the mark"? hold it where: centered, top edge, bottom edge, what? This is followed by Knoll telling her readers to "Trace around this hinge with a pencil. Cut around the hinge tracings with a sharp utility knife. The cuts should be as deep as the hinge is thick."

If Liz's readers are as dumb as she is, she missed two important points here (she probably didn't understand them in the original text she's attempting to reword). First, the mortise ("cuts") should only be as deep as the thickness of one leaf of the hinge, not the hinge itself, and second, the mortise must open to one face of the door but not extend all the way across the door's edge (see our image). Gonna tell 'em that, Liz? We thought not... Liz follows up with mediocre instructions on how to use a chisel -- no discussion of the orientation of the tool's cutting edge -- and then tells you you're done.

One question, Liz: most pre-hung doors have hinges with curved corners. How they gonna make that shape of a mortise, huh? You don't know, because you don't even know what a mortise is -- and that's why you're our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how_7763336_carve-out-hinges-wooden-door.html

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