Making the pintles

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2010

A quick hinge preview for you. I won't install the hinges until after the shutters are painted. I have drilled the nail holes into the straps. The wire nails I will fabricate will go all the way through the shutter and then be bent over and clinched on the opposite side of the wood.

I have used a patina product called "Instant Rust" from Modern Options on the hinges. It is real rust but just a light surface coating. I have not used this product before, I am pleased with it. I purchased it in my local hardware store, it is part of a line of decorator products.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2010

The pintles I am using to hang the shutters are very simple to make. I have used annealed steel wire. Make a simple 90 degree L shaped bend and then cut to length. Don't forget to dress off the end of the wire so it is smooth with no sharp edges left from being cut by the pliers. The other end that goes into the wall can be pointed. That is what the cup shaped grinding stone in the Dremel motor is for, dressing smooth the end you don't want to be sharp.

Dollhouses come in cans?

I have started fabricating the shutter hinges. They will be strap hinges with a pintle support that comes out of the wall of the house. A very basic type of hinge that is not difficult to make.

Research told me a thickness of 3/16 of an inch was used for some real hinges of this type. That meant I needed metal of approx .01 inches to create a 1:12 scale part. Digging into the drawers of metals I have on hand I found a tinned can that was a good match. As I wanted steel for the hinges that also meant it was a good choice. There was a strip of metal wound around the key used to open the can. That is what I am working with.

The tin and plastic coating on the can must be burned off with a torch. This is a job to do outside as the fumes are not good for you. You can anneal the metal at the same time as you burn off the tin. I have given my metal a hammered finish so I had to again anneal the area I was going to form into the hinge barrel as the hammering work hardened the metal.

I am forming the end of the strap around a piece of music wire that I am holding in a vise. Music wire is very stiff and strong so it makes a good forming rod. Tonight's new discovery was that my pair of nylon tipped pliers I purchased at a bead store make easy work of the forming. I can grab onto the metal and hold it against the music wire without damaging the metals. The nylon is soft enough to gain a grip onto the hinge strap so I can pull the strap around to form that tight circle. The top surface of the vise acts as an alignment guide so I get a barrel that is at the correct square angle instead of being crooked in alignment. Of course my forming pin must be clamped at exactly 90 degrees to the top of the vise for this simple trick to work. Or if your don't own a vise you can drill a perfectly perpendicular hole the same diameter as the music wire in a piece of hardwood as use that as your forming tool jig.

Now that I have the hinge barrel formed tomorrow I can cut the strap to length, drill holes in it and even do some decorative shaping of the strap if I wish to do so.

Window Latches

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

The working window latches are just about done. I can see that I need to move the catches on the upper and lower edges over to the right a little more. Digital cameras are so fantastic to use for an instant critique. It really gives you a fresh perspective and virtual set of  eyes that have not been staring at a miniature part for far too long.

The handle in the center of the latch is a fragment of one of the Vintag brass findings I got at the Fusion Bead store in Seattle the other day. The brass rod has a darkening patina applied to it. No bling allowed on this dollhouse but there is a richness of texture and detail that tells its own story in this structure.

In case you are wondering about scale the brass rod I used is 1/32" in diameter.

While they are not a replica copy of any particular window latch they are of the early style that was found on old houses. They will do nicely.
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Installing the hinge

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

My hinges started out all bright and shiny, these were the gold plated over brass hinges from Houseworks. First thing I did was take a butane torch and burn off the gold plating. Then I took a needle file and cleaned the burnt oxide off the back of the hinge so it is bare brass again. That filing step also roughed up the surface just a little, giving it tooth. Now the glue will stick to it nicely. 


While I was at it I took some smooth jawed, duck billed, pliers and straightened out and aligned those hinge knuckles. Shame on you Houseworks, all your hinges have wonky knuckles. I also have to hammer the hinge leaves flat as they often have a cup to them.

Why mess up lovely gold plated hinges? Because the shiny gold would be completely out of character with the dollhouse I am building. My hinges have been out in the briny salt weather where plating or lacquer coating has absolutely no chance of surviving. I could have done a rust finish or a green patina finish but I am happy with the dull blackened look.

photo courtesy of gorilla glue

For the last several months I have been using a new kind of superglue. It is formulated with a little bit of rubber to make it shock resistant. I love this stuff better than any superglue I have ever tried before. It works just great for miniature hinge jobs and there is not a strong chemical smell to it. I got a gel version as hinges and recesses are never perfectly flat, the gel fills up those little gaps nicely. 

Most super glue companies are selling this kind of rubberized formula, I am currently using the Gorilla Glue brand because that is what I found at the store.

When you go to glue your hinge be sure both halves are supported so the hinge is balanced and you don't have to fight it flopping around and pulling loose before the glue is cured. I have clamped a scrap piece against my door for support of the unglued half, you can see this in a photo down below where there is natural wood next to the blue door.

Spread a little glue in the hinge recess you have cut and push your hinge down into it. You don't want any excess glue squeezing out and over the hinge surface, use enough to make a full coverage but not a huge amount. Hold it down for a minute or so to make sure it is firmly set.

After the glue is set up I used a needle sharp, very fine tipped awl to poke in starting holes for the nails that came with the hinge. The awl is a better choice than trying to drill a hole, you can see how small the awl tip is in the photo below, it is super sharp. I grap the nails with flat nose tweezers that have small grooves all along the inside edge. The head of the nail slips between the grooves and they grip the nail so you can push to start it. First though I put a little dab of glue on the tip of the nail so it won't come back out of the hole. You might need to push the nail on down further with a small flat, metal object such as the tip of a flat blade screwdriver until the nail is fully set against the hinge. 

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Next I take a needle file and flatten the nail heads out quite a bit. That makes the heads smaller, they look more realistic and it also removes any gold plating. I used a chemical patina solution to darken the shiny brass nail heads and also the hinge. Now I have grungy old hinges for my grungy old door.

My favorite dollhouse hinges come from Micromark, they are solid brass and are not gold plated. The quality of the hinge joints is superior to those from Houseworks. However I did not have enough of them for this project and I did have lots of the Houseworks product. 

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.

Hinge project

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Today I was able to spend some time making practice hinges for my doll house cellar door. My first practice pair are shown above, they are not finished yet.

The camera is a great critique tool, turn on that macro lens function and you simply can't hide the flaws in the work. I can see that the sizes are not a close enough match, the top hinge is just a little too wide as it enters the details on the end. Not enough emphasis on the taper on that strap. The brass looks like iron under room light but shows up brassy under the camera flash, that won't do as dollhouses do get photographed.

I am certainly no blacksmith yet. Good thing this is a rustic dollhouse. I will need to do several more pairs before I get it all figured out. I do want them to look weathered and rusty which is a good thing. That way I don't have to drive myself crazy trying to get them looking like a Tiffany jewelry piece.

Getting brass to look like rusted steel without putting paint on it is tricky. But a little aluminum oxide grit blasting with a air(brush) eraser and a combination of several chemical patinas has got it heading in that direction. I will have to record what I do, in what order and what formulas I used that worked.

I need to work on the pintels next. A pintel (pintle) is a hinge pin that slips into the single knuckle on my hinge strap. I am not quite sure which way to approach the fabrication of them so I suppose it would be best to try several ways of making them and see what looks best.

I try to make most of the components that go into my projects. I want them to be as unique as possible while still referencing historical architecture sources. This approach is like slow cooking versus fast food. It takes extra time and I have to learn a whole lot of techniques.

The spiral curves on the end of the strap are called rams horns. Those were fun to make with a special type of pliers, the package they came in calls them coiler pliers, but they are also called looping pliers or wrapping pliers. I took a several hours of one on one instruction from IGMA artisan Alan Hamer several years ago and he introduced this handy tool to me. Alan used to be a blacksmith and took up making the same kinds of items in miniature after he suffered injuries that would not allow him to do full size smithing. Alan teaches at the IGMA school in Castine, Maine.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009