Putting a door's latch on and lining it up?

[Deleted member 174758]

Your drilling points should be identical both for height and inset. Try using a combi square to transfer the lines around the door (lightly) and either the combi or your marking gauge to mark the drilling centre lines. If the door has a heavy grain (such as an American ash veneer or just oak can give) consider marking the drilling centre point with a pointed tool such as an awl - the tiny starter hole produced by one of those will keep the drill on centre better at the start if the hole.

 

[Keitai]

Yes, although you need to learn to get the edges a lot straighter. Mark out lightly then deepen the marking lines with a knife, or better still a good sharp chisel. 32 0rv38mm for the sides and 15/16 or 18/19/20mm for the top and bottom

Had another go at using marking gauge on door plate. Think I got it wrong because plate wouldn't push in enough. Think chiseled out hole was too small (narrow).

Do you simply put plate on door and push two pins right into wood on either edge of plate (whilst it is held in centre )then tighten obviously block against side in right position the remove plate and mark vertical lines?

This door hanging attempt went much quicker than before. I had it swinging in no time. I used just block plane (no electric plane)and planed in situ whilst hanging mostly. Think blade isn't sharp enough but sort of dud did it.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

A little bit about the terminology I was taught "back in the day": a door frame is rebated to take the door and generally pretty thick (45mm or thicker) and is almost always installed on exterior doors, although some buildings have them on interior doors, too, and you most often don't fix architraves on them; a door casing is thinner (generally 32mm for FD30 fire casings), is rebated to take the door and mostly has architraves fixed to the outside edges; a lining is similar to a casing (i.e. 32mm thick and for interior use) but has no rebates and the rebate is formed after the door is hung by affixing a stop lath ("banging strip" in the Midlands, I believe) to the face.

It would help if you learned to use the correct terminology. The lock face plate is the piece of the lock recessed flush in the edge of the door - the bit of ironmongery in the jamb of the door frame/lining/casing is generally referred to as the keep or receiver. And the significant bit about it is that you cannot use a mortise or marking gauge to mark it out. If nothing else, if you think about it, the architraves will mess up any attempt to mark out from the edge of the lining or casing (in the case of interior doors) whilst the rebate will nobble you on door frames and rebated casings because the keep is very often only 3 to 5mm off the edge of the rebate. So, wrong tool!

It is now that you need to have made a good job of putting that lock in absolutely central to the door. Close the door so that you can see where the sprung latch will end up being and put two pencil marks across the rebate using a combi square. If the lock mechanisl has a mortise mark the top and bottom of that in the same way. Offer the keep up and mark two pencil lines for the top and bottom extents of the keep. You should now have either 4 or 6 lines running across the rebate.

Next measure the door thickness, which is maybe 44mm (for an FD30) and do the same for the rebate it is going into (door frames and rebated casings only). The rebate should be about 1mm deeper than the thickness of the door. This is to allow for 1mm thickness of paint finish. If it isn't 1mm greater than the thickness of the door you have a problem qwhich will need to be dealt with a bit of adjustment (see below). As I said the lock should have been fixed in the middle of the door, so if you transfer the centre line of the lock drillings (i.e. the centre of the door) onto a combination square (directly transfer from the centre line marked on the door, never by setting to the numbers on the scale as this is a sure fire way to introduce errors). Yo can also mark the top and bottom screw hole positions as you do need to avoid these when cutting the recesses. That is then used to mark the centre line of the keep in the door frame/lining/casing. You should now have a set of markings which looks like this in the rebate:

Now measure the width of the keep. This is often different to the width of the lock face plate. Add half the width of the keep to the measurement on your combi square, so if that measurement read as "23mm" and your keep (main body part) was 28mm wide, you'd add 14mm to the setting on the combi square, giving 37mm. Put a pencil line down the rebate. Do the same for the outside edge of the keep body, but subtract the hald width from the centyre line measurement (23mm - 14mm = 9mm) and again make a pencil mark. Measure the widths of the pockets at the rear of the keep and repeat the exercise for them:

Next mark the top and bottom extents of the pockets on the rebate. The area in pink is the pocket you will need to recess to the thickness of the keep:

Then you need to mark out the position of the little bent protection tab if the keep has that, together with its' thickness. This is shown in yellow here:

What I tend to do then is drill out the waste with an appropriately-sized Forstner bit (in a tool kit you rarely need more then a couple TBH) then finish with a chisel, or in some cases I just take it out with a chisel (obviously you need to sever the fibres first, so your chisels need to be razor sharp - blunt doesn't hack it and will leave you with a result that ends up looking like you carved it out with a spoon):

Note: the lower one is shown drilled, the upper one is shown drilled and fully chiselled. This shouldn't be done using either an auger bit or a spade bit because on very deep keeps you coiuld end up coming out the back of the casing/lining. I've found some nice bits of Amazon with built-in depth stops which are ideal for the job.

Having chopped out the recesses the shallow recess for the keep is taken out with a sharp chisel - yet again you absolutely need to knife the lines neatly before using the chisel:

You can now offer in your keep and make any adjustments necessary to get it to sit flush, such as cha,mfering the leading edge of the tab recess, radiusing the corners wher the tab meets the main plate, etc.

Obviously this doesn't cover more awkward features such as radius-ended keeps, keeps with plastic box inserts (for the recesses), etc which add further layers of complexity, but I wouldn't expect you to even look at doing those.

As you can see there is almost as much work putting the keep in properly and neatly as there is in putting the lock in in the first case. A properly fitted keep will close with a nice "click" and you shouldn't be able to rattle the door once it has been painted

Nota bene: Pencil marks should be as faint as possible, made with a very sharp H or 2H pencil (but certainly NEVER one of those fugly*, useless carpenter's pencils which should be reserved for rough carpentry, not accurate stuff like this) and should always be removed afterwards (a damp cloth generally does the trick).

* - Composite word, I'm sure most people reading this will get my drift

 

[conny]

As someone said in another post, you really should write some books JAK. Be a nice little earner for you.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

The thing about trying to write this stuff down is that I find my self going back and revising stuff several times every time because I invariably remember stuff afterwards that I have missed out, or little "tweaks" I've picked up along the way, etc. The thought of trying to write this as a book... I'd probably turn into a gibbering wreck in a week! But thanks for the thought

 

[Keitai]

Still trying to take in that last post of yours thxs. I'll try and push marking gauges two pins right on edge (but on woodside) of latch or lock faceplate before scoring down.

Quick question this - would two wedged pieces of wood be more stable than one u suggested in a picture I found u posted before in an old thread?

I made this awhile back

I circled the wedged piece on one colour and just baton in other colour.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

Still trying to take in that last post of yours thxs. I'll try and push marking gauges two pins right on edge (but on woodside) of latch or lock faceplate before scoring down.

From the sounds of it you haven't got what I wrote at all. I never recommended using a mortise gauge for marking out keeps, only lock faceplates. Nine times out of ten you simply cannot mark out a keep with a standard mortise or marking gauge because (i) the architrave gets in the way of the fence , and (ii) the end of the stem fouls on the shoulder of the rebate because it is too long (see illustration above for explanation of the parts of a mortise and marking gauge). Instead you need to use your combi square which can butt up to the edge of the door frame/casing/lining even with the architrave in situ and avoid hitting the shoulder of the rebate. OTOH using a marking and mortise gauge makes marking out more accurate I find.

Make no mistake about it - swinging doors and locking out isn't rocket science, but doing it properly requires a methodical and careful approach to achieve acceptable results

Extra tip: Once you have marked out and knifed your lines, use the longest chisel you have to make the knife lines deeper before removing the majority of the waste. For many joiners this means using a 50mm/2in chisel for the long edges of a lock face plate or long keep recess (wider chisel = less chops in = straighter edges). You keep this chisel razor sharp and hone it before use - a blunt chisel is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard, You also don't use that chisel for general jobs if you can avoid it - it is kept mainly for doors: hinge recesses, face plates and keeps. If you still haven't got your chisels to the point where you can shave the hairs of the back of your arm with any of them, you need to practise some more - blunt tools are a sure fire way to banjax any job

Second extra tip: Lock body recesses shouldn't be cut too tight and then opened out with a chisel as this often results in twisted mortises which can tilt the lock body over and make life difficult for you later on (e.g. when you are trying to align the handles or lock barrels). If your lock body measures, say, 18mm at the thickest point and you only have 5/8in (16mm) and 3/4in (19mm) auger bits then use the 3/4in one - being 1mm oversize is better, but you do need to ensure that the faceplate recess has a flat bottom to ensure that the lock body installs parallel to the face of the door. A wider chisel helps avoid this sort of thing:

That edge is horrific and no amount of filler will cure that. I'm also left with the suspiscion that the lock isn't centred properly, which can lead to issues getting door to latch properly on the keep

Third extra tip: Don't use tapes to measure out when you are fitting locks, other than for the obvious measurements, like the spindle height from the floor. This principle applies to almost all joinery work - never measure anything unless you have to, and use a rod or jig, etc to transfer measurements, Similarly don't depend on printed guides stuck on the door as they are prone to inaccuracy:

If you need to mark out a drilling point on both sides of a door strike a centre line around the door and use your combi square to mark the centres to get this:

If the door is sensitive material that will mark easily then use masking tape over the surface to protect it or consider using a jig instead (see below)

If doing a lot of doors, or dealing with doors where you cannot leave marks on the door, make up an accurate drilling jig from scrap timber (in this case a peice of 2 x 1 PSE softwood batten and some 10mm plywood):

it will be more accurate, repeatable and save time. Marks can be transferred with a scratch awl, a birdcage maker;s awl or even by spotting the point with a 2 to 2.5mm drill bit in a combi drill

Quick question this - would two wedged pieces of wood be more stable than one u suggested in a picture I found u posted before in an old thread?

It's generally a waste of time making two of them. If you make the door block properly you just don't need two of them for lightweight domestic-size doors. If yours doesn't hold the door relatively firmly then you probably need to make it out of wider timber and a bit more carefully. At the end of the day it's a quick and dirty tool to make-up, as needs be, from a single offcut of wood which (in my case) will be tossed on the skip when I'm done with it. What it isn't is a joiner's bench

 

[^woody^]

As someone said in another post, you really should write some books JAK. Be a nice little earner for you.

TBH, I'd be more interested in a TV series based on Keitia's exploits.

 

[Keitai]

View attachment 256949


From the sounds of it you haven't got what I wrote at all. I never recommended using a mortise gauge for marking out keeps, only lock faceplates. Nine times out of ten you simply cannot mark out a keep with a standard mortise or marking gauge because (i) the architrave gets in the way of the fence , and (ii) the end of the stem fouls on the shoulder of the rebate because it is too long (see illustration above for explanation of the parts of a mortise and marking gauge). Instead you need to use your combi square which can butt up to the edge of the door frame/casing/lining even with the architrave in situ and avoid hitting the shoulder of the rebate. OTOH using a marking and mortise gauge makes marking out more accurate I find.

Make no mistake about it - swinging doors and locking out isn't rocket science, but doing it properly requires a methodical and careful approach to achieve acceptable results

Extra tip: Once you have marked out and knifed your lines, use the longest chisel you have to make the knife lines deeper before removing the majority of the waste. For many joiners this means using a 50mm/2in chisel for the long edges of a lock face plate or long keep recess (wider chisel = less chops in = straighter edges). You keep this chisel razor sharp and hone it before use - a blunt chisel is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard, You also don't use that chisel for general jobs if you can avoid it - it is kept mainly for doors: hinge recesses, face plates and keeps. If you still haven't got your chisels to the point where you can shave the hairs of the back of your arm with any of them, you need to practise some more - blunt tools are a sure fire way to banjax any job

Second extra tip: Lock body recesses shouldn't be cut too tight and then opened out with a chisel as this often results in twisted mortises which can tilt the lock body over and make life difficult for you later on (e.g. when you are trying to align the handles or lock barrels). If your lock body measures, say, 18mm at the thickest point and you only have 5/8in (16mm) and 3/4in (19mm) auger bits then use the 3/4in one - being 1mm oversize is better, but you do need to ensure that the faceplate recess has a flat bottom to ensure that the lock body installs parallel to the face of the door. A wider chisel helps avoid this sort of thing:

View attachment 256955

That edge is horrific and no amount of filler will cure that. I'm also left with the suspiscion that the lock isn't centred properly, which can lead to issues getting door to latch properly on the keep

Third extra tip: Don't use tapes to measure out when you are fitting locks, other than for the obvious measurements, like the spindle height from the floor. This principle applies to almost all joinery work - never measure anything unless you have to, and use a rod or jig, etc to transfer measurements, Similarly don't depend on printed guides stuck on the door as they are prone to inaccuracy:

View attachment 256961

If you need to mark out a drilling point on both sides of a door strike a centre line around the door and use your combi square to mark the centres to get this:

View attachment 256959

If the door is sensitive material that will mark easily then use masking tape over the surface to protect it or consider using a jig instead (see below)

If doing a lot of doors, or dealing with doors where you cannot leave marks on the door, make up an accurate drilling jig from scrap timber (in this case a peice of 2 x 1 PSE softwood batten and some 10mm plywood):

View attachment 256958

it will be more accurate, repeatable and save time. Marks can be transferred with a scratch awl, a birdcage maker;s awl or even by spotting the point with a 2 to 2.5mm drill bit in a combi drill


It's generally a waste of time making two of them. If you make the door block properly you just don't need two of them for lightweight domestic-size doors. If yours doesn't hold the door relatively firmly then you probably need to make it out of wider timber and a bit more carefully. At the end of the day it's a quick and dirty tool to make-up, as needs be, from a single offcut of wood which (in my case) will be tossed on the skip when I'm done with it. What it isn't is a joiner's bench

I understood what you said about not marking the keep side of door out with mortise gauge.

And using mortise gauge to find centre point of door not lining then drilled out latch hole, no problem.
Mortise gauge is great for that for me.

My issue was using two pins to mark out edges of face plate (part which goes into door that's called a faceplate isn't it?), i just tried again and it's too wide. The pins pushed either side of plate into door -score then when chiselled out (along vertical edges are TOO wide.

Maybe just use a sharp pencil then score with stanley safest for my abilities and not use both pins

The two outside edges of pin are marking it too
wide. Maybe technique? But I ain't got it. Red mark shows 1mm too thick.

Pix on scrap door shows it's too wide

 

[Deleted member 174758]

If you set the points of the gauge directly from the lock face plate, how can they be too wide? You aren't putting the sides of the pins against the edges of the face plate, are you? Watch how this guy sets a mortise gauge from a chisel at about 0:17 - same principle only he's using a chisel and not a lock face plate, but otherwise it's the same

Note that he doesn't measure the width of the chisel or the width of the wood - neither is needed

 

[Keitai]

If you set the points of the gauge directly from the lock face plate, how can they be too wide? You aren't putting the sides of the pins against the edges of the face plate, are you? Watch how this guy sets a mortise gauge from a chisel at about 0:17 - same principle only he's using a chisel and not a lock face plate, but otherwise it's the same

Note that he doesn't measure the width of the chisel or the width of the wood - neither is needed

Got it. Yeah I was doing that.

His words 'VERY TIP OF PINS on either side of chisel' . I was pushing them into the wood either side if lock/latch plate therefore giving myself too wide a mark.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

Told you.

 

[Keitai]

A little bit about the terminology I was taught "back in the day": a door frame is rebated to take the door and generally pretty thick (45mm or thicker) and is almost always installed on exterior doors, although some buildings have them on interior doors, too, and you most often don't fix architraves on them; a door casing is thinner (generally 32mm for FD30 fire casings), is rebated to take the door and mostly has architraves fixed to the outside edges; a lining is similar to a casing (i.e. 32mm thick and for interior use) but has no rebates and the rebate is formed after the door is hung by affixing a stop lath ("banging strip" in the Midlands, I believe) to the face.

It would help if you learned to use the correct terminology. The lock face plate is the piece of the lock recessed flush in the edge of the door - the bit of ironmongery in the jamb of the door frame/lining/casing is generally referred to as the keep or receiver. And the significant bit about it is that you cannot use a mortise or marking gauge to mark it out. If nothing else, if you think about it, the architraves will mess up any attempt to mark out from the edge of the lining or casing (in the case of interior doors) whilst the rebate will nobble you on door frames and rebated casings because the keep is very often only 3 to 5mm off the edge of the rebate. So, wrong tool!

It is now that you need to have made a good job of putting that lock in absolutely central to the door. Close the door so that you can see where the sprung latch will end up being and put two pencil marks across the rebate using a combi square. If the lock mechanisl has a mortise mark the top and bottom of that in the same way. Offer the keep up and mark two pencil lines for the top and bottom extents of the keep. You should now have either 4 or 6 lines running across the rebate.

Next measure the door thickness, which is maybe 44mm (for an FD30) and do the same for the rebate it is going into (door frames and rebated casings only). The rebate should be about 1mm deeper than the thickness of the door. This is to allow for 1mm thickness of paint finish. If it isn't 1mm greater than the thickness of the door you have a problem qwhich will need to be dealt with a bit of adjustment (see below). As I said the lock should have been fixed in the middle of the door, so if you transfer the centre line of the lock drillings (i.e. the centre of the door) onto a combination square (directly transfer from the centre line marked on the door, never by setting to the numbers on the scale as this is a sure fire way to introduce errors). Yo can also mark the top and bottom screw hole positions as you do need to avoid these when cutting the recesses. That is then used to mark the centre line of the keep in the door frame/lining/casing. You should now have a set of markings which looks like this in the rebate:

View attachment 256919

Now measure the width of the keep. This is often different to the width of the lock face plate. Add half the width of the keep to the measurement on your combi square, so if that measurement read as "23mm" and your keep (main body part) was 28mm wide, you'd add 14mm to the setting on the combi square, giving 37mm. Put a pencil line down the rebate. Do the same for the outside edge of the keep body, but subtract the hald width from the centyre line measurement (23mm - 14mm = 9mm) and again make a pencil mark. Measure the widths of the pockets at the rear of the keep and repeat the exercise for them:

View attachment 256921

Next mark the top and bottom extents of the pockets on the rebate. The area in pink is the pocket you will need to recess to the thickness of the keep:

View attachment 256922

Then you need to mark out the position of the little bent protection tab if the keep has that, together with its' thickness. This is shown in yellow here:

View attachment 256923

What I tend to do then is drill out the waste with an appropriately-sized Forstner bit (in a tool kit you rarely need more then a couple TBH) then finish with a chisel, or in some cases I just take it out with a chisel (obviously you need to sever the fibres first, so your chisels need to be razor sharp - blunt doesn't hack it and will leave you with a result that ends up looking like you carved it out with a spoon):

View attachment 256929

Note: the lower one is shown drilled, the upper one is shown drilled and fully chiselled. This shouldn't be done using either an auger bit or a spade bit because on very deep keeps you coiuld end up coming out the back of the casing/lining. I've found some nice bits of Amazon with built-in depth stops which are ideal for the job.

Having chopped out the recesses the shallow recess for the keep is taken out with a sharp chisel - yet again you absolutely need to knife the lines neatly before using the chisel:

View attachment 256933

You can now offer in your keep and make any adjustments necessary to get it to sit flush, such as cha,mfering the leading edge of the tab recess, radiusing the corners wher the tab meets the main plate, etc.

Obviously this doesn't cover more awkward features such as radius-ended keeps, keeps with plastic box inserts (for the recesses), etc which add further layers of complexity, but I wouldn't expect you to even look at doing those.

As you can see there is almost as much work putting the keep in properly and neatly as there is in putting the lock in in the first case. A properly fitted keep will close with a nice "click" and you shouldn't be able to rattle the door once it has been painted

Nota bene: Pencil marks should be as faint as possible, made with a very sharp H or 2H pencil (but certainly NEVER one of those fugly*, useless carpenter's pencils which should be reserved for rough carpentry, not accurate stuff like this) and should always be removed afterwards (a damp cloth generally does the trick).

* - Composite word, I'm sure most people reading this will get my drift

You said there are two useful sizes of Forstner bits , what are they? Maybe referring to drilling out keep or just general use.

Do you ALWAYS score marking gauges' Mark's with a Stanley before chiselling? I guess they're too light to chisel straight from

 

[johnny2007]

4 pages of explanation to drill straight through a door...
Come on mate, this is another wind up!
I fitted hundreds of those locks and it takes no longer than 15 minutes each, including sipping tea.
If you can't mark a door accurately on both sides and drill through it straight, you should consider a change of career.
Maybe something that requires less precision, mining for example...

 

[HERTS P&D]

Don't forget Johnny, we are talking about a person who asks advice on washing hands and hanging fairy lights.



Andy