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Figure 2
Figure 1
Figure 3
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After nearly an hour of
banging, umming, ahhing,
discussing the problem with
suppliers, tea swilling, and yet more
banging, I came to a most unwelcome
conclusion: the only way that we’re going
to get this miserable thing to budge is to
take an angle grinder (or similar) through
the gap, and try to cut off the hooks.
I must have been about 30 seconds away
from resigning myself to failure, giving up
and going to buy an angle grinder, with
the sad knowledge that it would likely rip
up the edge of the door and the frame.
For some reason, I thought of just giving
it one last go. ‘Bashing those hooks with
the hammer must have done something…’
I thought. Enlisting the assistance of my
customer (something that I would never
normally do), I inserted the wedge above
the top hook, leaving space just in case
the hook retracted. I showed my customer
where to hold the wedge so that it had
sufficient tension, and then tried sliding a
very thin screwdriver through the gap and
up to the hook.
It moved; there was a little bit of play in
it! It was still a good centimetre inside the
keep though. More tension on the wedge
that was now bent by nearly 30 degrees…
Walk the hook back with the screwdriver,
take a second screwdriver underneath
and angled in under the hook and inside
the keep, and hit it with the hammer. Even
though the hook refused to retract, I now
had a screwdriver firmly pinned between
it and the frame. I repeated this for the
next hook down, then the next, and by the
time I got to the bottom hook, it offered
little resistance to my efforts.
The door now had each hook pinned
back [Figure 1], but still under excessive
tension. Having checked that there was
nothing else protruding from the door into
the frame, I went around to the front and
applied a firm, size 7½ right foot to it. The
door swung open as if a drunk had opened
it in a bid to make last orders at the bar.
Result! The door was opened as per my
client’s instructions:
No damage (save for a couple of
completely unavoidable, and barely
noticeable scratches on the frame by the
top hook).
But why had this happened in the first
place? Well, the gearbox had completely
collapsed, but for a door that was just over
a year old, that seemed rather strange. The
new strip was installed within 5 minutes,
and I went to close the door. All became
immediately apparent: when I attempted
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to raise the handle, the hooks
just wouldn’t engage in the
keeps. I enquired as to if this is how
the door normally was, and my client
responded in the affirmative, indicating
that you had to push the top of the door.
A spirit level then showed that the door
was indeed warped by nearly a centimetre
at the middle from both top and bottom
[note the gap between the spirit level and
door in Figure 2].
Despite making adjustments to the
keeps, the door still required that it be
pushed in at the top to allow it to close
properly. This is not an issue whilst
you are inside the house, albeit an
inconvenience, but it certainly does pose
problems when you come to leave the
building. The excessive force required to
lift the handle to engage the hooks had
resulted in the catastrophic failure of the
old gearbox [Figure 3], and after coughing
up £250 for the repair, I still had to inform
my customer that it would happen again
if the underlying fault was not to be
rectified, namely, replacing the whole
door with something that doesn’t warp.
Ultimately, whilst it is becoming ever
more popular, it is this locksmith’s opinion
that MPLs should never be installed on
real wood doors.