Side, two millimeters. Height, two millimeters. Depth, three. That is the entire budget.

Know the three screws and what each one actually moves

Three adjustments, three locations, and mixing them up is where the afternoon goes. SIDE is the front screw on the hinge arm, and Blum describes it as turning to increase or decrease door overlay, plus or minus two millimeters. That is the one that changes the gap between a pair of doors. HEIGHT is a cam screw on the MOUNTING PLATE rather than on the hinge, described as rotating to adjust door position up and down, plus or minus two millimeters. DEPTH is the rear spiral cam screw on the arm, plus three and minus two, and it changes how far the door stands off the cabinet. The tool for all of them, per Blum’s own sheet, is a number two Phillips or a number two POZI driver.

Measure the gap top and bottom before you touch anything

This is the diagnosis and it takes a tape and ten seconds per door. If the gap is even from top to bottom and simply in the wrong place, the whole door needs to move bodily, which is precisely what the three axes do, and you are in business. If the gap tapers, being wider at the top than the bottom or vice versa, the door and its opening are not parallel and moving the door will not make them parallel. That is a box problem or a door problem, and against a two millimeter range it is usually unwinnable at the hinge. Making that determination first is the difference between a five minute fix and an afternoon.

Height first, then side, then depth

Blum documents the three axes without prescribing an order, and there is a sensible one worth reasoning out. Do height first, because it is set at the mounting plate rather than the hinge arm and is therefore independent of the other two, so it will not be disturbed by what follows. Do side second, since that sets the overlay and the visible gap to the neighboring door, which is what anyone looking at the kitchen actually sees. Do depth last, because it changes how far the door stands off the cabinet face, and on a shaker or profiled door a change in standoff visibly changes how the side gap reads. Working in that order means each adjustment stays true once made.

Adjust one axis across every hinge before starting the next

The most common procedural mistake is working hinge by hinge: taking the top hinge through all three adjustments, then the bottom one. That introduces twist, because the door is being pulled in different directions at different points before any axis is settled. Work by axis instead. Set height at every hinge on the door, then side at every hinge, then depth at every hinge. The one deliberate exception is using slightly different SIDE settings at the top and bottom hinge to correct a small taper, which is a legitimate technique and is also strictly limited by the same two millimeter range, so it buys you very little on a genuinely racked opening.

Your mounting plate may not have height adjustment at all

Worth checking before hunting for a screw that is not there. Blum notes that several mounting plates have cam height adjustment, which is the implication that not all of them do, and gives the alternative method for the ones that do not: loosen the screw, adjust the door, and retighten the screws. So on some cabinets the height axis is a slide-and-clamp operation rather than a turn-a-cam operation, and the plate is what determines which. Identify the plate before promising somebody a quick adjustment, because the non-cam version needs the door supported while the fixing is loose and is a two-hand job.

Spiral-Tech depth does not need loosening, and older hinges do

A real difference between hinge generations that changes the procedure. Blum states that all CLIP top hinges feature Spiral-Tech depth adjustment, which eliminates loosening and retightening the adjustment screws, and quantifies it: one and three quarter revolutions creates five millimeters of adjustment without loosening a fixing screw. On CLIP hinges without it, their instruction is different, to loosen the rear screws on all hinges, adjust, and retighten. If you are working on an older kitchen and the depth screw appears to do nothing, that is the likely reason: it is a fixing screw rather than a cam, and it needs releasing before the door will move.

Hinge count is a chart with two inputs, not a rule of thumb

People size hinges by door height and stop there. Blum’s guide indexes door height, marked at twenty, forty, sixty, eighty and one hundred inches, against weight bands of under fifteen pounds, fifteen to thirty, thirty to forty-five and forty-five to sixty, and states plainly that door weight can also determine the number of hinges required. Which means a short heavy door and a tall light door can need different counts, and a solid wood or glass-panel door of the same size as a plain slab is a different problem. If a door sags over the first year despite being correctly adjusted, an under-hinged door for its weight is a likelier cause than a defective hinge.

If a light door will not latch, switch the soft close off

The most satisfying thing in Blum’s documentation and almost nobody knows it. Soft close hinges ship activated, and there is a switch: slide it toward the hinge arm to deactivate, and the door must be closed once for the deactivation to complete. Moving the switch back reactivates it. This matters because soft close works by resisting the closing motion, and on a very light or narrow door that resistance can be enough that the door does not quite pull itself shut. The instinct is to adjust the hinge harder or blame the catch. The answer is often to deactivate soft close on one of the two hinges, which leaves the damping present but halves the resistance.