Mortice lock not closing

[Lobster]

A bit of a ball-ache, this - front door is secured by a mortice latch/lock but is ever-so-slightly out of position, so that the latch will only engage if you either slam the door, or close it fully and gently, and apply a sudden 'shove' to get the latch to click into place (something that SWMBO's not strong enough to do). In other words, the striker plate needs moving no more than 1 mm outwards from the frame.

There's no way I'd able to fill and redrill the screwholes in the frame effectively (the old and new would overlap). Suggestions, please?

Thanks David

[Phil]

File 0.5mm off the plate & 0.5 mm taper on the latch....

[Martin Brown]

Adjust the plate by filing some metal off the edge which is catching. You might also want to look at why the door frame is moving about!

Bear in mind that wood swells in the damp and shrinks in the warm and dry so tolerances can drift about a bit naturally.

If you put dry marker or engineers blue on the latch surface you may be able to see where it is catching eg on a burr or something.

[Brian Gaff]

I have a door that has warped giving a similar result. I just filed a bit off the plate. the snag that I had not bargained for is that the warp changes with the weather, thus making it loose or OK.. Sometimes one cannot win.

Brian

[stuart noble]

Block the old screw holes with matchsticks. Use a bradawl to start a new hole on the edge of the old one.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

I've often used bits of cocktail sticks and kebab sticks for this kind of thing, both useful because they are pointy, so can be broken off an dlightly hammered into the holes.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

Careful application of some of the stick-on door seal products (sold by B&Q etc) can provide enough stuff to fill the gap when a door is loose while at the same time not blocking it when the door is tight. It does mean you may well not have the seal running all round the frame and/or that you might have more than one thickness of the seal in different places around the frame.

[stuart noble]

Yes, I'm way out of date. Who has matches any more? :-)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Work out where the bolt is fouling on the striker plate, and relieve the striker plate with a file.

[harryagain]

You can fix the screw holes problem by "carving" a bit of wood into a plug, dip in PVA glues and hammer into screw holes. Cut off when dry.

[The Medway Handyman]

Or we could get really technical and drill a 6mm hole, glue in some 6mm dowels, trim flush when dry & start again.

[Lobster]

Thanks for the responses. So, approximately evenly distributed between filing down the plate and stopping up and redrilling the holes...

I've certainly done that trick before plenty of times, but in this case

- really? Moving the centre of the holes by just 1 mm? I can't see that working - the centre of the new hole will be within the boundary of the old one.

Filing isn't as straightforward as it may seem, as the striker plate doesn't simply have a rectangular hole in it for the latch to pass through, it has a box around the hole: (eg like

Might try and see if I can find a different striker plate in fact, without the box, and which may well also have screw holes in a different position...

David

[Martin Brown]

Filing a boxed one is tedious but still doable. That is one reason to use engineering blue/dry marker pen to find the high spots that jam since you want to do as little work as possible!

[GB]

If it's only 1-2mm, you could alter the screw holes in the striker plate, so they are oval. That's probably the easiest bodge of all with one of those rotary files in a drill - takes a few seconds and job done.

[Lobster]

Sounds like a plan! Nice one = thanks! David