Hinges for butterfly leaf table

[Myles Moran]

I'm working on a butterfly leaf table, and I'm struggling a bit with hinge selections for the butterfly leaves and for the aprons on the leaves.

For the butterfly leaves, I was pretty well sold on the soss invisible hinges. Biggest drawback would be screwing them into endgrain, but that's fixable by drilling and gluing in a piece of dowel into some holes on the bottom of the leaves. Then I watched a series of videos on YouTube where barrel hinges were used for the butterfly leaves. They seem more economical to buy, easier to find, and no issues with screwing in endgrain. Otherwise I have zero experience with either style of hinge. The leaves are 17" wide (cross grain), fold out to 48" long, and are 1" thick.

Then, for the aprons on the leaves, I was hoping to use a piano hinge to fold them (and magnets to keep them from swinging one way or the other). The problem is I cannot find a 12" hinge with slotted holes. Because of the cross grain orientation between the apron and top, I had planned on using a center screw and 2 slotted holes to affix the hinge to the top so it had room to expand and contract. Is there a good source for hinges like this, or is there a better solution I haven't thought of?

[Richard Dooling]

Hi Myles,

Not sure if this will help. the first link is for hinges and the other two are for the pivot.

Were you able to find a plan somewhere? I'm interested in this as a dining table design.


https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/hardware/table-hardware/extenders-and-leafs/66493-folding-leaf-hinges

https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop...m?item=17K1542

https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop...ount-mechanism

Rixhard

[Myles Moran]

That 3rd link for the pivot looks like it might be the ticket for the table. I had planned on using a piece of drill rod but I was worried about clearance with wood bushings. I always forget about lee valley, probably because I always associate them with high end hand tools that are way too expensive for how often I would use them. I always forget they have more than that.

As for plans, I couldn't find any that were close to what we were looking for so I did the design myself. The table is 4'x4' without leaves so it can fit board games we like to play, and it seems a lot of tables are 40" wide or so. We wanted self storing leaves, and then the design just kinda spiraled out from there with fitting as many leaves in as we could given the space. Since it's a square table they had to be folding otherwise they couldn't self store. I've probably spent more time staring at the design in CAD than I have building it so far.

[Richard Dooling]

This is about the best I've found although I don't much care for the slide support method. The plan can be down loaded for free from their site or p.m. me and I'll e-mail you the PDF.

https://www.woodcademy.com/plans/but...ng-table-plans

BTW he uses Soss hinges and that's what I'll probably use also.

I'm a little intimidated by the mechanism so I may make a child size version so I can visualize it better.