Today on Repairs101 I’m going to show you a really common problem – and that’s a
door that has a loose hinge. I’ll show you the most common cause of it and what you can
do about it. Alright so it’s fairly obvious to me that
the cause of the problem is this carpet here. Well I could take the easy way out, that’s
for sure, and just get rid of the carpet and tighten up those screws and it’ll be fine.
Right? But you know I want to take the door off the hinges and plane the bottom, don’t
you? So what I’ll do is: I’ll show you how
to take the door off the hinges and put it down. Plane between an eighth and a sixteenth
of an inch off the bottom and we’ll put it back up and see if it doesn’t clear our
carpet. So something simple that you need to know
about removing a door is close the door and start here at the bottom. Take out the bottom
pin first and then go to the top and remove that so that you’re standing. ‘Cause if
the door starts to come down on you, you don’t want to be down here underneath you want to
be standing up where you can catch it easily. There we go. We just want to get under the
cap of the hinge pin and tap it and tap it and tap it. OK and that’s all there is to
removing a hinge pin, very simple. Now you definitely want to use a proper punch
to do this. This one’s one of my favourites, it’s got a nice rubber coating on it for
shock absorbing. If you don’t if you can’t find a punch then a cold chisel is also great
for the job OK. OK now so if you don’t have a punch to hit
this with you might just try taking the ball-peen or even the flat end of your hammer and try
just working it up. You see that, it jumped. There we go and out it comes. OK.
Never ever, ever use a hammer on the end of your screwdriver. If you hit this with a hammer
it could shatter and the shrapnel could go everywhere including into your eyes, leaving
you in a lot of trouble. So, and of course you void the warranty if your tools are warranted
you don’t want to do anything that’s going to void the warranty. You know it’s worth
it to spend the extra couple of dollars to get something that’s designed to be hit
with a hammer like a punch or, say, a cold chisel.
Now you see the reason I say do this with the door closed – I’ve got both the hinge
pins right here and the door, as you can see, is holding itself in place. So the hinge halves
are simply balancing still, one on top of the other, and it’s all being held in place
by the door inside the door jamb and even the latch from the doorknob is adding support
on this side keeping it from falling and dropping off.
There you go, how easy is that? If you’ve got a nice big workbench to put
it up on that’s great otherwise maybe some saw horses are what’s best for you. Folding
saw horse or one that you make yourself – anything like that will be good. I’m just going to
throw it up here on the kitchen counter. There, I’ll bet you didn’t see that coming.
OK so here’s a great trick I learned a long time ago. Say you’ve got a problem like
this where you’ve got a screw that just turns and turns and turns and turns so the
hole is stripped. One thing you can do is just upgrade to an oversize screw OK.
If you’ve got a stripped out hole like this one you can remove the screw and take an ordinary
toothpick like I’ve got here and just shove it in. Break the end of it off and then put
your screw in beside it. The piece of wood that your toothpick provides gets jammed right
in there really nice and tight and provides for a really solid anchor. And as you can
see now that isn’t going to spin anymore. You take a wooden toothpick – or perhaps
two, if you have a lot of space. Break it off in the hole, just tuck it in like that,
break it off into the hole and then take your screw and put it in alongside of that piece
of wood and when you do you find that it bites right in and provides for a really nice solid
– oh, look at that – arrrgh – a really nice solid bite on the wall now. So behaving
as though it is part of the structure and it’s holding it all in there by means of
compression.