On 17 Feb 2006 08:56:02 -0800, wrote:

Hey all:

Not much of a carpenter, but I can follow directions. The front door of
my mom's house has always worked perfectly. But my last two visits, the
darn door will not latch when I pull it shut.

If I really yank and slam it, the Kwikset thing finally sits in the
door frame and holds closed, but, of course, don't want to be doing
this forever.

Forgive my technical terms here, but the metal spring-loaded latch
thing retracts into the door smoothly and pops back out with catching
or other trouble, except for going into the "box-thing" in the door
frame.

The weather hasn't been any different than any other of the dozens of
years here. Anything I should start with....

This isn't very likely but it happend to me. During the summer I let
mail, especially newspaper like stuff, pile up by the front door,
which has a mail slot. Eventually I couldn't lock the door easily,
although it seemed to latch ok.

When I had my head on the floor, I noticed that the weather stripping
on the bottom of the door, that is meant to go into a slot in the
aluminum threshhold, had gotten twisted half way across the door.

There had been a period of time when the door didn't shut well. I
thought it was mail etc. that was getting in the way, but it was this
aluminmum strip, when it was twisted but not yet crushed.

It took less than ten minutes with a piece of wood and a hammer to get
the twisted (now vertical) part back to being horizontal, and fitting
in t hat slot again.


P&M

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