Hinges for a 'lift off trap-door'

I have used self-latching Blum hinges on some 2.2m x 0.4m doors of 18mm MDF and they work quite well. You can get types that swing 110deg. and more which in your case would overcome any tendency to swing close on their own. Most of the modern Blum hinges detach from their backplates by flicking a small lever at the back if you need to remove the hatches completely.

Hmm, I might buy a pair and see how they might work. I'm not quite sure how they will fit round the framework that supports the 'hatches'. Thanks for the idea, I hadn't really considered kitchen door type hinges.

I just had a thought, thinking about how easy (or not) it will be to detach the panel from the hinges when one wants to.

Can one get fairly robust/heavyweight hinges where one half of the hinge is a pin that goes into a hole?

One side of the hinge would be screwed onto the edge of the fixed floor around the hole, then the side which is a pin/rod of some sort would be inserted into the edge of the 'trapdoor'. On opening the trapdoor it just sits on the pins by gravity, to remove it you just lift it off the pins. I guess there could be some sort of locking mechanism to keep the pins in place if that seems necessary.

So, the question is, what's this sort of hinge called? I've seen small versions of them used on jewellery type boxes but not larger ones. Also, I'm not sure if the exist in a 'one sided' sort of version where one side is standard hinge and the other half is the pin.

It's sort of like a barrel hinge, but not quite.

On doors often called "Rising Butt"

Sounds frightfully 'gay'

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Karl Marx

I think you mean something like a "lift off case hinge" - I used them when I made a flight case for a son's stage piano. Try "lift-off hinge flight case"

No, that's not what I mean. My description is obviously no good.

The essential ingredient is that one half of the hinge is a pin that inserts into the body of the door. This isn't the hinge's swivel pin.

Searching for "lift off case hinge" produces a lot of the type of thing I was originally thinking of. They're like ordinary but hinges but one half is 'incomplete' so it doesn't go right round the hinge pin and can be lifted off when the 'door' is partly open. This may well work for me. So "lift off case hinge" is a useful search name.

It's still not what I have in my mind.

Think of a hinge where one half is a bit like this:-

Chris Green snipped-for-privacy@isbd.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@q957.zbmc.eu:

Not really that robust, I assumed you would want something like a regular butt hinge (for robustness) and something that you could perhaps rebate into the surface for at least a semi-flush fitting (and close butting of your engine hatch timbers).

I searched for "flat plate lift off hinge" and got a fair few good results with this being a good example:

Not the cheapest but you get the idea.

Do you really need hinges? Why not just put a finger lifter in each end of each board?

Tim

Most times when lifting the 'doors' it's just for daily checks so you want to 'open the door' and do checks. A hinged door will be handier for this as it will stay in place and can just be lowered afterwards without any hassle.

Though I suppose for the daily inspections one could just lift one and put it to one side (on top of the next one).

So you may be right! :-) I'll have to think about what the daily checks need in terms of accessibility to the engine etc. It might be that some can be done without engine access, the only one that definitely needs it is the dip stick.

Thanks!

Fit a small hatch over the location of the dipstick - and an extension to the dipstick if it's out of reach with your arm through the hatch.

Chris Green wrote:#

Any good? Seems reasonable for a chandler ... they have lift ring pulls too

They would work but they stick up above the surface, not important in some places but this is the floor inside the boat so it would be annoying at the very least - and there's a rug over it usually! :-)

However someone has come up with a good solution elsewhere. Make each hatch with a 'hatch within a hatch'. The main/big hatch just lifts off (no hinges) for when I need to get down and do engine maintenance and such. Then there's a little, hinged, hatch in the main lift-off hatch which gives access to the daily check things. This seems an excellent solution to me.

I think this is most of the way to the right answer. See my reply to the next in thread. Make the 'big' hatches simply lift off and add small access hatches within the big hatch for the daily checks and inspections.