My wife alerted me to a loose cabinet face in our kitchen. She said she’d been screwing one of the hinges tight for several months, so I decided to investigate and discovered this.

I’m not sure what the original installer was thinking with this, but maybe there were some extenuating circumstances that led to this rush job.

Anyway, we really needed to use these particular screw holes, otherwise we would’ve had to pick two other ones which would’ve required woodworking to make a new cut for the hinge on the cabinet face. I don’t have the gear for that, and it would’ve made the hinge placement uneven. So, I decided to try to repair the screw holes.

This post will be a bit long and rambly since I did a LOT of experimenting and learning for this one, and frequently I would have to take several days-long breaks between experiments to let product dry.

I started out by trying a squeeze tube wood filler from DAP, color matched to white.

I got a pro tip from this youtube video to drive the screws into the filler and let them sit for a couple minutes in order for the filler to take on the shape of the screw threads.

It’s a bit difficult to get a good shot of this. Here’s the best close up I could get.

Something I didn’t think about ahead of time was sanding down the bulged out holes prior to applying the product. Oh well. I did it afterward, which is fine since wood fillers are meant to be sanded.

I first used a sanding sponge to really grind it down, then sand paper to do some finer finish, then the handheld vac for cleanup.

I tried dry fitting the hinge base, but it wasn’t quite level yet.

Also, after sanding the holes kinda looked like this.

So I applied some more wood filler to level this out and restore the color. Same process as before. The result ended up looking like this after the second application.

Now, I was feeling pretty good about getting the base plate back on. But, it turned out the screws just couldn’t go in far enough to make the plate flush with the wall, so it was no longer a sanding problem. It’s no wonder this hinge failed…someone didn’t drill the appropriate holes for these screws.

OK so now the strategy became drilling in JUST A SMIDGE since this is literally the end of a cabinet, and drilling too far meant drilling through the cabinet. The face of the cabinet is only about 3/4 inch. I used black oxide bits, but Titanium would have worked just as well if not better.

I don’t remember which YouTube video I learned this from, but I basically measured the screw shank and put a piece of tape on my drill bit at about the same length, so I knew when to stop.

This tech works remarkably well. Lots of wood filler debris on my drill now, so I had to clean up a bit.

At this point my new strat was to actually dry fit the base plate first to see if it was flush.

This time, when I applied wood filler, I left the base plate on (again) to hopefully get a more accurate result.

Here’s the screw hole caverns.

And after scraping with a putty knife

OK so at this point this process has been going on for a few weeks. The recommended curing time for the wood filler is 3 days. I thought I was finally at the finish line. I felt pretty good about screwing the base plate into the cabinet box.

I tried reattaching the cabinet face. In case you’re interested, my hinges are Salice soft close, full overlay, 105 degree hinges.

It was VERY wobbly and unstable. It was pretty clear at this point that the base plate was still not flush and the wood filler was not going to be able to hold the weight of the cabinet face. Sadness…

So I had to sand some more, but what to do about the stability? Luckily I have had great success with the steel putty product from JB Weld, and it turns out they have a wood putty product as well, so I was pretty confident I could be successful with that.

A video would be easier to give you an idea here, but basically you open the tube, cut a chunk off, and start mixing by rolling and shaping them with your fingers. The texture is like clay. It’s essentially a two-component epoxy, similar to the glue, but in a single column semi-stiff putty form. Rolling the putty around in your fingers causes the two components to activate vs having a little mixing tray, which is typical of an epoxy glue.

I used the same application technique as the wood filler. I used the screws to create threads in the putty, let it sit for a couple minutes, then removed the screws before the product hardened.

So that takes care of the strength part since JB Weld epoxy putties are indestructible. For the stability, it turned out that the base plate had a small amount of play from front to back, so I did a couple things…

  1. Bend it with pliers and a wrench
  2. Apply some wood filler to the cabinet where the front of the base plate rests

Not perfect, but a lot more flush!

This was finally enough to have acceptable performance for the cabinet face.

I had to do a bunch of adjusting of the screws on the plates themselves to get the alignment right, but that’s boring stuff and this post already went on way too long lol