What's up everyone? Welcome back to The Durbin Compound! If you haven't met me already,
my name is Devin Durbin. So today on the channel, I'm going to show you guys some tips and tricks
on how to get your door to latch shut. These are for those of you who are having trouble
with a bent hinge or a door that's out of alignment that you just cannot get latched.
I'm going to show you some tips and tricks that will hopefully help you out. So stay tuned!
All right guys, so we're at the patio door here. I'm going to show you that this thing does not want to close.
So today I'm going to show you on video just how I'm going to solve this issue.
So this is probably something that you're running into and exactly why you're here on the video.
So, a couple different things to check. You want to make sure that the gap on the door is the same at
the top and at the bottom. So my door is pretty well aligned in its space here. For some reason
this door jamb is out of line with the other side of the door. So the hinge side of the door, you can see
I have a narrower gap there, and then it comes up to a big gap here. So, somebody has
already adjusted this door to make this, you know, even over here. So, that's what you want to figure out first.
Do you have a gap at the bottom or the top? Is it basically one way or the other?
Or do you have an even gap? If you have an even gap, then most likely your hinge side does not
need to be adjusted. So, with this door, and some quality doors, you might have an adjustable hinge.
So, the adjustable hinge is nice because you can literally just take a Phillips screwdriver and
you can adjust the door in or out. It basically has an adjustable cleat here and it will allow
you to adjust it. But if you don't have one of these, you can bend the bracket. You can do a
couple different things. You can pull the pin out and you can bend the bracket. And that will bring
your door closer or further away from the jamb. So, today it looks like that I am going to just
concentrate here on my strike plate. So, I have an even gap. If you don't have an even gap, you need
to get your door to have an even gap. So, like I said, you can tweak this hinge one way or the other.
If you tweak it this way, it will pull your door up. If you tweak it back this way, it will go down.
So you can take a pair of channel locks and you can actually tweak that hinge and get it to line up.
So some interior door hinges are easy to tweak with a pair of pliers. That might be
a solution for you. But it looks like my striker is just a little high down here. See? So you want
the striker to come in right in the middle of the plate. So obviously mine's a little high.
So what I'm going to show you--a little trick to see exactly where our problem areas is. We're going to paint this
with a paint marker and then shut the door and see exactly where it falls. All right, for this
I'm literally just going to paint this with the paint marker here. You only want to paint the edge
of your striker here. You don't need to be too crazy with it. Just get a nice decent area there.
And slide it back and forth a couple times. And it will leave a little residue here around the top.
So, you can see where it kind of streaked in some black here. And it's right here at the top
it's giving us trouble. So, this has always been too low. So, whoever installed this door did not get this right.
This whole thing needs to come up. So we are...this is something that we could probably just Dremel out here.
If you wanted to, you could take a file, a round file, and you could probably file out
this little piece here and it would probably latch just fine. So, looks like somebody's tried to mess
with the door before and stripped out a screw. I'm going to just file this out really. I think I'm just
going to take out a little bit of material here and get this door to latch. If you do need to move
it considerably, let's say if your striker is up here and it's way, way off, then you will need to
take out your screws and notch your jam out up here with a chisel. So, the chiseling only needs to go as
deep as the striker plate. And then you need to make a little deep pocket here for the striker to fall into.
But for this little minute adjustment here, all I'm going to do is file out this.
All right guys, so what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take my file and I'm going to just get rid of that edge there.
Now if you're a baller on a budget, and you do not have a file, you can literally use anything that
you have around the house to work that back a little bit. Chances are it's not that bad and you
just need to get that corner out of there, to get it back into place. So, you could use a drill bit,
use the side of a drill bit, and wear it out. You could use a couple of different things if you're
really limited, and you don't have the means, you can make this work. So, I'm just using a triangle file
and trying to get this basically to widen out at the top. So, if this doesn't work, then we will go ahead
and move the striker plate up a little bit. I'm not really worried about it. It'll be good for
the video if we need to. So, all right. I open that up a little bit. Let's see exactly how much it did.
All right, so that one method of using a file to get that kind of rounded out did not work.
So we're going to remove our strike plate. We're going to move it up just a little bit here, still probably using our
same hole here, just chiseling this out a little bit more, and move it up maybe 1/4"
so that we are at the center of our strike and make it easy. I'm going to go up to about here.
Cut our weatherstripping out of there.
All right, simple as that! So you always want to first hit the chisel in like this. And then slice up. So, you could even do a little bit of this by hand.
If you have a nice sharp chisel, you can chisel out a lot of this by hand. So, just take your time.
Be patient. Get a little area cleaned out here for this. So, now that we have that cleaned out
for the strike plate to move up a little bit, it looks like I'm going to need to
move that corner up a little bit as well. So we'll go ahead and depends on what door frame
material you have, but usually you could do a lot of this by hand, and just moving the chisel
around here--like that. Clean it out. Make sure our strike moves up where we need it. Okay.
Now we're going to take some of this material out here and move this area up here. So, this is all by hand here
and I'll just kind of move this back and forth. And then you can just cut that out.
So if you have a nice sharp chisel, you do not need a hammer.
You just kind of move it in there and tear it out.
All right!
Now we will have to move our holes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to is...always pre-drill your holes
in your door jamb here. So you don't want to strip it out or split the casing.
So, I guess it's not really casing. You don't want to split the door jamb here. So, it's very important
that you go ahead and pre-drill the hole here.
All right, for my pre-drill, I'm just going to go ahead and hold my strike plate up. And then we're going to get kind of a center going on here.
And we're going to put our screws back in.
All right, our strike plate's back in place. So let's go ahead and try to test the door close. And I may have to take out a little bit more material here.
I'll just go ahead and do it, just so that I know for sure that it's going to close here, and call that a day.
All right! Just like that! All right! Let's test it close.
All right and now it shuts. So we have a great fitting door release there. Boom!
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