Hornbeam":14furndb said:
I am looking for the properly swaged ones which taper in thickness from the hinge pin out to the side of the leaf
"Swaged" is a term that's become fairly loose, and I regularly hear people using it to mean completely different things. However, I've never heard swaging to mean a hinge with tapered leaves, in fact I'm not sure I've ever seen a hinge with tapered leaves.
The "standard" cabinet butt hinge (the type shown in your photo later on in the thread) is what I call an "unswaged hinge", one of my concerns with these is this; if you have a relatively thick knuckle and relatively thin leaves then there's a big gap when the leaves are parallel. This matters because, unless you sink the hinge leaves below the surface or cut complicated angled hinge mortices, then that gap will effectively become the gap all around your cabinet doors. On many hinges that gap can be in the 2-2.5mm range, where as I prefer a 1mm gap, with 1.5mm being the absolute limit. To get that tighter, neater gap you really need butt hinges with far thicker leaves.
I've often bought hinges from Horton Brasses in the USA for just this reason, so I was delighted to see Percy Snodgrass's post, which seemed to show a UK distributor for Horton's butt hinges. I'll certainly be following that up. The irony previously was that Horton sourced many of their best hinges from British foundries, but they set a far higher spec than anyone else. So I was in the daft position of buying a British hinge that had been shipped to the US, and then having to pay to have it shipped back here!
Swaged hinges are hinges where there's a manufactured kink in the leaves, which means the leaves can lay flat against each other. You get half swaged and full swaged hinges, but rightly or wrongly I associate them with larger joinery hinges rather than cabinet hinges.
Hinges generally seem to be drifting ever down in quality as more people appear to buy on price alone. As far as I'm concerned if there's any play in the knuckle when the two leaves are flexed, then I'll reject that particular hinge. Other common problems are inadequately drilled countersinks, poor quality or ill-fitting screws supplied with the hinge, thin leaves, low grade brass, poorly finished hinges, etc.
