Hinge recess jig

I designed and built a simple jig today to create those pesky little recesses, otherwise known as mortises, that the door and window hinges drop down into. They are so easy to mess up trying to guide the tools by hand. Too wide, too deep, too long, crooked, I have made all those errors before and I was tired of fighting the task.

My jig is made from  leftover pieces of material that were donated from Don's workshop. He has a real treasure trove of metal odds and ends and fasteners too. I used 90 degree aluminum angle. The larger of the two pieces was 1.5" x 1.5" by .125" thick. It is long enough and wide enough to allow me to clamp stop blocks to it and also the clamp the pieces I am going to attach hinges to.

The hinges I will be using are just under 3/8" in length, they are the standard dollhouse door hinges you purchase from stores. To create a guide notch in the angle I used a 3/8" end mill cutter, I could have used a 3/8 straight cutting router bit instead. The bit created a little too long of an opening so I glued in a brass shim to shorten the length. (Note that I don't always get these things right on the first try) Or you could use a narrower bit and take two passes to make the opening.

My chisel is guided down against the three edges of the opening. Hand pressure is all that is needed to make these shallow cuts.

The second piece of 90 degree angle was epoxy glued to the first piece. It is used to control how deep the bottom of the recess will be cut and to guide the chisel in so it is level for a perfect flat bottom for the hinge to rest on.

My chisel rest on the smaller angle as I push in to remove the waste piece. All  you need is light hand pressure to pare out the waste. A very sharp chisel is required for the task, my chisel is .25" wide.

I hope this post inspires you to make jigs to improve the quality of your work and also to make it much less stressful. I made mine for both reasons as I hate to mess up windows and doors I have spent a lot of time making. I was dreading the hinging task so I motivated myself to do something to make it easy for all the miniature houses I want to build in the future.

The secret to designing jigs is to think about the motions you need to make for the task and how you can control those motions for accuracy and repetition in the simplest way possible.

 How will you guide the tools you use to make cuts and how will you hold the piece you are trying to cut in the correct position?

You can build a hinge recessing jig out of hardwoods, just be careful not to allow the chisel to cut into the guiding surfaces. It will last a good long time. Or you can glue thin brass to those surfaces to give them an even longer lifetime of use. If you use a jig often and it gets a lot of wear then metal is a good choice.

Window progress

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

The windows are coming along. I wish I could say they are almost finished but there is still much to do. I will be making the frames that hold the windows and go into the house openings next. Then comes the hinging. After that there is more wood trim  goes onto the windows. There is a vertical piece that covers the join on the casement windows. There is a drip molding to fabricate that glues onto the lower edge of the windows and door. That drip detail keeps rain from getting into a house. After that is hardware, knobs, locks and such. Shutters will be made later and installed after most of the exterior work on the dollhouse is finished.

You will see on some of the windows that are not painted there are bits of blue showing. I paint inside all of the grooves I made to hold the glass. The blue color in there helps disguise the thickness of the glass. In addition the back side of the muntin strips that glue to the glass are also painted. You would be able to see the bare wood if they were not painted. Painting is done with a watered down, very thin coat of flat, exterior house paint. I run the corner edge of a piece of glass through the groove to act as a scraper to remove any excess paint. The grooves are painted before I glue the window frames together.

I have decided to cut new walls for the dollhouse out of the thicker foam cored EasyBoard. It is about 7/16 thick although they call it 1/2". I want window sills and 1/4" is just not going to give me that look. Having the windows and doors all framed up makes it easy to create the openings to the exact size. Two steps forward one step back, oh well it will get done one of these days.

I am looking forward to getting this part of the job done so I can get those walls up and start the timber and stucco work. Working with tweezers to put in tiny bits of muntins and then detailing them with a scalpel is not my favorite task. But I am not done with it yet, looking at the sets of windows next to  the door I realize I need to take the muntins off the door and change it from a 6 lite grid to a 9 lite so the proportions all work together.

My original thought was to do some leaded glass windows but for some reason I decided not to. I do have two types of windows with different muntin patterns that might have been salvaged and installed at a different time. On a centuries old cottage replacement windows would be the normal look.

Even on more modern houses I have owned and renovated I have seen three sets of window changes on a cottage  that was only 80 years old. There were the original wood framed, plus some single paned aluminum and also some double paned vinyl windows. All the exterior doors were different types too. Another house I owned was built with salvaged windows the original builder thought were charming.

In-scale lumber knots

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Yesterday a neighbor in the building pulled up in front of the dumpster and started tossing in pieces of wood. He was tearing out the railings from his front stairs. The contractor had built them with wood that was not rot resistant so indeed they had started rotting in our damp climate. The stairs were only a few years old so I knew the paint on them was not lead based.

Not wanting to see a tree wasted I snagged the spindle pieces to see if I could use them for a miniature project. I have been working on a design for a house that will have natural planked walls in a lighter wood than the cedar I normally use for miniatures. I am so very happy I took the time to get that lumber. When I cut off the white latex paint  I discovered in-scale knots just perfect for a 1:12 dollhouse. That is a very rare thing to find, I am thrilled with it. I could have haunted lumber yards for a long time finding just the perfect material. I did find a source for this lumber, it is Pine from Canada. The Home Depot stores in the Seattle area have it. But only the smaller boards such as 1 x4 and 2 x 2 have the small knots and small grain. Probably because this small diameter lumber comes from near the top of the tree where there are lots of tiny branches. I have to pick through the stacks of lumber, maybe, at best in a stack one board out of 25 or 30 has the small knots. I now have it on my list of things to look for when out running errands, Don takes the time to check for me too whenever he is in that store.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Here is a photo of how the exterior side of my door and one of the casement windows is coming along. It is sitting on top of the in-scale knotty timber I just cut. You can really see just how perfect that lumber is going to be in a dollhouse project. The aging on the door is getting close to perfect. It is a lot of work to get good aging, it is like creating a watercolor painting of an object. Most people just take sand paper to the edges doing that shabby shic thing. That does not create realistic aging on the exterior features of a dollhouse. Paint fades with a lot of variation in color, one color of paint for the door would not recreate that look. I have several shade of paint on the door plus I have grayed the natural wood and added a thin gray paint wash on top and splattered on some paint for splashed up dirt spots and bug splats.

Beveling the Inset Door Panels

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

I am placing a slight bevel on the two panels that will insert into the lower half of the front door of the cottage. I have tilted my miniature table saw over to about 10 degrees. The exact degree within a few clicks or so is pretty much arbitrary on this project. What I am after is a beveled look to the panel that is not too wide and it creates a width at the panel edge that will slide into the slot I showed you yesterday that I put into the framing pieces.

Mostly what I want to show is one way to do this type of wood cutting task safely. Holding small parts so you can perform some kind of shaping operation on them without messing up your fingers or the part is always something you have to think about. However people rarely show just how they do this, mostly you see how it looks when it is all done.

I have taken the small panels I cut to size and applied double backed carpet tape to them. It the photo above you can see that I have place them right against each other while cutting. That is just to save time so I only have to make half as many passes on the saw instead of cutting one at a time. Then I have adhered them to a larger piece of wood I can easily hold onto and push through the saw. I rotate the panels around four times so I get all the sides beveled. The tape is strong enough for this holding task because and I emphasize this fact boldly here I AM NOT TAKING AGGRESSIVE CUTS. I am only taking a very small amount of wood off of the panels therefore the torque of the saw blade will not throw my pieces into the air or jam them down into the saw blade. There is also no danger of these thin panels slipping down and jamming into the slot next to the saw blade. I don't have to use a tall fence or feather boards to keep these tall, thin panels standing upright because they are stuck to that nice comfy to hang onto 2x2 board. A difficult cut is now very quick and easy to do.

I use double back tape a lot, it is very handy for work holding all kinds of things when a clamp or screw can't be used. I just ran out of tape  with this job so I will drag myself off to get my favorite kind, clear plastic, thin carpet tape from the "Do It Best" Hardware Store. That is a nation wide chain in the USA and they also carry K & S engineering metals as well as Northeastern Basswood in the stores in my part of the country.

To find out if there is a "Do It Best" Hardware Store near you, CLICK HERE

photo courtesy Do-it-Best Hardware

I like this particular tape because it holds firmly but it is not impossible to get your part unstuck. Any tape residue will clean off the unfinished wood with acetone.

I could have routed the bevels on the panels or sanded the bevels into the wood or filed them or even planed or carved them. There are many ways of doing this same task if you don't have a tilt arbor table saw and/or don't like using power tools.

Windows and Door

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2007

The photo above is the entry door to the Acorn Cottage, is is a plank door with cross banding. The owl is a brass finding I bought. The door handle I made from a strip of brass I textured and bent then solder onto it etched brass leaves. I purchased the sheet of photo etched leaves at a miniature show. I also used the leaves on the light fixtures for this woodland cottage.

It is time to start making windows and the door for my new coastal cottage. That requires a lot of research and quite a few decisions before I can begin to cut the wood pieces.

I am going to create a few outward opening casement windows. They need the shashes and trim moldings cut to shed the rain away from the opening. These windows are also a good opportunity to add some small scale detailing to draw in and capture the viewers eye and give them a change from the larger textures and shapes of timbers and stucco. The visual animation of hinged opening windows and doors helps to break up the plane of the exterior wall surface. An outward opening casement also allows me to place a table right against the window. Objects on the table will help the viewer transition their interest into the inside of the cottage with a little sneak preview. The photo below shows a real life example with the type of detailing I will make.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2008

The window style above with the dolls in it is what I will be using for the coastal cottage.
The drip edge at the bottom of white window frame will be a challenge to create. Love the French blue color of the sill below the window.


I have roughly imagined a build date for my projects framing of around mid 1600s to late 1700s but the time frame for the dollhouse as it stands will be 1900. Now that gives at least a couple of hundred years of remodeling changes and wear and tear on the building. A lot of things happened to home design during that time span, chimneys and fireplaces changed and windows, doors and hardware changed too.

When you look at the really old buildings you often notice changes in the framing around door and window openings, maybe they were added or enlarged or made smaller or even closed up areas that used to have windows and doors.

I plan to have a few small windows from an earlier era on the sides as well as the casement windows. My centuries of fisherman owners were into salvaging and scrounging for some of their improvements and left other things intact from previous generations. Sometimes the sea washes up lumber for home improvements.

This is a scratch building job, you can't walk into a dollhouse store and buy an odd assortment of windows spanning several centuries that are going to fit into a custom design. Over the years I have made dollhouse windows several different ways and I have a few new ideas for making windows I want to try out on this project. This time around my front door will have window panes in the top half as I want some extra light coming into the interior.

The glass I will be using for my dollhouse windows is clear with little waves and bubbles in it. It was mouth blown in France. Up until about 1930 or so most window glass was made by these methods. Picture windows are a modern invention, old windows are made from small panes because that is the only aviable size the glass came in. If you click on the link below you will see a video showing how the glass I am using was made and why window panes were always rather small.
Mouth Blown Glass Video


Update I have finished the door and windows since this blog was first posted. You will see it showing up now and again on more recent posts.