Archive for category door
There’s a clever post title involving the word ‘doorknob’ around here somewhere, I just know it…
This is quite an old post, but I finally remembered to take a picture of the finished project. Old house, old doors, old door latch mechanisms – and plenty of neglect by tenants over the years. Screws had stripped out so the knob and latch on my bedroom door was barely held in place anymore:
Attempts to fix it over the years look to mostly have involved larger and larger screws, which just gouged the wood more each time the door banged closed:
This was another fairly quick repair, thanks again to Abatron‘s wood epoxy (putty) which I can’t recommend enough for these sorts of small replacement jobs. Side note: This is the second time I’ve linked to Abatron in this blog and both times I’ve linked to the Wood Epox directly; they also make a sister product called Liquid Wood which helps harden soft or rotted wood, and is recommended for use on the area where you’ll apply Wood Epox. Just so you don’t feel I’ve led you astray, consider buying both products at the same time – I often use both, but sometimes, frankly, I’m lazy.
Now it was just a matter of fitting all of these pieces back together correctly:
…with one small stop to the workroom. The back of the warded lock block had broken years before, and someone had attempted a fix with duct tape:
This was a more crucial part of the repair than it might immediately seem. Without a full, strong back ‘wall’ to this block, the whole internal mechanism could shift just far enough back and into the block that the latch wouldn’t always spring free and catch in the door jam. This, too was easy enough to deal with – some Goo-Gone to clean up the surfaces, a quick filing job to make sure the broken piece fit snugly back onto the block, and a bit of SuperGlue to hold it in place. Yup, SuperGlue works just fine on these old metals:
Reassemble everything, and sink a few new screws into the rebuilt ‘wood’. Voila! Working door knob: