We have an old portacabin that we use as a second bath/laundry room. It's one that my dad kitted out about nine or ten years ago and I've just finished repairing a latch on a door that my dad fitted to separate the shower-toilet section from the washer-dryer section.
The door latch had become stiff and sometimes it would jam so that you couldn't open the door. It's needed seeing to for a while but as Mrs R said, "You won't be happy until I get locked in there".
Well she did get locked in there and I was happy, but I couldn't really put off mending the latch and longer.
When you press down on a door handle it turns a square connecting rod. This rod then turns a small cog which drags the latch backwards, allowing you to open the door. When you let the handle go a small spring pulls the latch forward again and a bigger, stronger spring returns the handle to it's starting position.
It's a lovely simple system and for the most part it performs faultlessly day in day out for years, sometimes for decades. We only really notice it when it goes wrong.
When it does go wrong, it's usually because the years of metal against metal movement have worn the moving parts a little and that wear produces swarf, a kind on metallic sawdust that that eventually builds up to a point where it gums up the works.
It's a simple fix. just remove the mechanism, clean out the swarf, old grease etc, re lubricate and re fit. Job done.
I set about doing ours and was immediately reminded that this was my dad's handiwork. For a start the door was quite a bit thicker than normal and I knew that this would be because he had gone to a builder's yard or something and asked if they had any old doors kicking about.
"Oh, any size will do, I'll make it fit".
When I came to remove the door handle I could see that the extra thick door had meant that the screws supplied for fitting it had been too short to pass through into the opposite handle, so he had run a drill bit right through both handle back plates and joined them together with some long bolts instead of screws. Obviously they were actually too long because I could see where he had hack-sawed the surplus off.
This arrangement will have worked fine for a while, but the nuts that he used to secure the bolts must have started to work loose because at some point he also fitted a secondary nut or 'lock-nut' to keep the first nut in place.
Finally, if you look at the striker plate, (where the catch pokes through) you can see that it's home made. I haven't figured out why this is yet, perhaps he used a second hand lock set and the original striker was missing.
Mending that latch turned in to quite a poignant little job, Putting my hands where his hands had been, undoing bolts that he had done up, following his though process, seeing how he had solved these little problems.
When I was a kid, I would 'help' him with stuff like this. All the while the would be talking softly, explaining things, letting me try it.
I miss him so much, but then again, so much of him is always with me.
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