Soft close hinge blew apart on a big job yesterday

I was installing a set of rift sawn white oak cabinets for a client in Portland last week. About 30 minutes in, I opened one of the upper doors and the hinge just exploded - the plastic housing cracked right off, spring and piston flew across the room. These were Blum hinges too, not some cheap stuff. I've been using them for years and never had one fail like that. Made me stop and rethink the whole order. I called my supplier and they said there was a bad batch from late 2023 that had issues with the internal latch mechanism. So I pulled all the hinges I had in stock and swapped them out before they caused more problems. Cost me an extra 2 hours on site and about 80 bucks in replacement hardware. Has anyone else run into a hinge failure out of nowhere like that?

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the_alice1mo ago

Did you check the date code on those hinges right away?

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alicer531mo ago

Oh boy, of course I didn't check the date code right away. I mean, who does that on a first date with a piece of hardware? I was too busy admiring the patina and thinking how cool they'd look on my kitchen cabinets. Turns out those hinges were from 1972, which is actually older than me. The kicker is they were probably sitting in someone's garage for 50 years right next to a box of rusty nails I almost bought too. At this point I'm pretty sure my whole house could be held together with just good intentions and bad decisions.

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