This morning I opened my kitchen cabinet to get the cat food and I heard a loud snapping sound. Then the door didn't close by itself anymore.
It's a double door articulated at 90 degrees. So I looked at the hinge mechanism and saw a broken spring in the housing.
No big deal, said I naively.
Turns out there's more types and variations and sub-revisions of these hinges than there are particles at CERN. RF connectors look basic compared to the variety of hinges.
It's nuts.
It's branded Hettich. There are numbers stamped on each sub-part of the hinge which I would have figured are part numbers, but nope, no luck.
I've emailed them, no reply yet. I've dug through their clunky website and didn't find a hinge that looks like this.
The prices I've seen on American Home Depot are not bad, but Canadian Home Depot doesn't carry Hettich.
Trying to find a replacement torsion spring is hard, there's nothing out there shaped like that.
Has anyone ever done cabinet work? What do you do when you need to replace hinges? Do they have some sort of warranty?
It irks me that a simple broken spring means replacing an entire mechanism, this is a right to repair thing IMO. There are 26 hinges just in the kitchen and it seems that they're going to start popping one after the other now...