About a month ago, I moved into a new [to me] craftsman style home built in 1915. It's one of those homes where every part of it feels like there's history and stories to tell. Like the utterly overgrown greenhouse in the backyard that has been sitting dormant for ~50 years. Or the "doorway to nowhere" that opens to a 4-foot drop from the living room to outside. But I digress...

The front door is large (48" wide) and made of beautiful solid heavy wood with an antique mortise lock. As far as I can tell, the door and lock are entirely original. Over the years, the house has settled, and the door sticks terribly to the frame when opening and closing. Once you get the door open (or closed), the latch of the mortise lock sticks in the open position. At least the deadbolt works.

I figured it would be an easy job: Take the door off the hinges, square it up to the frame, and clean the lock. Join me on this adventure in which I learn way more about old locks than I ever expected.

The Journey (i.e. table of contents)

Project Logs

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How the lock works
Jeremy • 09/13/2020 at 08:03 • 0 comments

In this post, I'll walk you through how the latch works. Later we'll walk through what's causing the problems.

Two Mechanisms

There are two mechanisms for opening the latch: the lever outside the door, and the knob inside.

Outside lever

Inside knob

The Outside Lever

I've removed all the parts from the lock, but the pieces I'm showing.

This is what happens when you push the lever on the door handle on the outside of the door.

It pushes up on a block, which rotates another lever over. Not very existing yet. Now let's add the next part back to the lock.

This new lever nestles over the other lever, which will activate the latch.

Pretty nice, right?

The Knob

The knob mechanism is stacked on top of the outside lever mechanism.

Turn the hub in either direction, and it rotates the latch lever.

The outside door handle lever still works by sliding under the knob hub.

(Blue painters tape is lightly holding the knob mechanism, since none of the springs are attached for this animation)

And there it is. In my next log we'll dive into some of the wear on the parts which are causing problems.
Build a spring
Jeremy • 09/08/2020 at 03:53 • 0 comments

In a previous log, we discovered what was left of a broken spring in the lock. Luckily, I found a post online about my lock with a clear picture of the spring in all its glory.

It's not a standard shaped torsion spring, so can't simply buy a replacement.

Making a spring

It was clear pretty quickly that I would need to make the replacement spring. I could either buy a whole roll of music wire (spring wire) to make a small spring or buy a similar spring and bend it into shape.

McMaster-Carr to the rescue, as usual. I took measurements of the broken spring -- or what was left of it -- and found that this spring was the closest approximation.

Zoom, Enhance

To make this spring as accurate to the original as possible, I'd need to blow the picture up to life-sized. I opened the image in my image editing program (GIMP in my case) and enlarged the picture until the spring windings' outside diameter was the same size as the broken one. Then sent it to the printer.

(I ended up trading the round nose pliers for a pair of linesman pliers for the bending)

Bendy

Now, using two pairs of pliers (needle nose and linesman), I carefully bent the legs of the springs to match, using one pair to hold the spring tightly and keep it from deforming and the other to make the bends.

So far so good...

Am I doing this right?

That looks right!

I think we have a match!

I ordered a few extra springs and went through nearly all of them until I was happy with the result.

Are we done?

It felt complete. However, when I put things back together, the latch worked better, but it was still sticking, and the outside lever was still sagging. It was clear there was more to be done.

More investigation was necessary. Stay tuned; in the next log, I'll walk you through what I found.
All about this lock
Jeremy • 09/02/2020 at 23:45 • 0 comments

Simply cleaning the lock didn't fix the sticking latch and there was the issue of the rogue broken spring. Time to learn more about the lock.

The lock casing has the brand name Russwin and inside many of the parts have P1213 stamped on them. So I started with the assumption that this is a Russwin P1213 mortise lock.

My goal was to find anything I could about this lock. Especially pictures of what the parts inside the lock should look like and places selling replacement parts. The internet has everything, how hard would that be to find? It turns out the internet is more limited than I expected.

Eureka!

Doing searches for "Russwin P1213" turned up a lot of online auctions selling old locks and exactly one blog post with a teardown of the lock.

That blog post entry was like hitting gold! The author posted several critical pictures.

(don't mind the arrow, that's from the blog post)

Do you see the spring in the upper right of the picture? That's the broken spring from my lock! Now I know what it's supposed to look like.

Other resources

Now having a slight taste of success, I continued digging even further and looking for anything I could find about this lock. Old replacement parts for sale, old manuals, anything.

A site called Historic Houseparts has an entire section for salvaged antique door parts. Unfortunately, only a couple parts in their catalo look compatible in this lock, and no matching springs.

However, their Lock Resources page is a wealth of knowledge of old locks and manuals. Which led me to a product page from 1899 with a picture of my mortise lock in it (bottom left).

This lead me to Archive.org, which has a full copy of the company's hardware catalog from 1926, also containing a picture of my lock.

Great, now I have a few resources to work with. First, let's see about that spring.
A simple clean should do the trick?
Jeremy • 09/02/2020 at 23:19 • 4 comments
Just clean the lock, that should fix everything, right? How hard could it be?

The latch on the 100-year-old Russwin 1213 mortise lock was sticking in the open position and it seemed like all it would need is a good cleaning and lube.

My plan was simple:
1. Open the lock
2. Take a picture of the internals, so I remember how to put it back together.
3. Take everything out.
4. Clean them with WD40 and acetone to get all the gunk off.
5. Lube everything up with graphite dry lubricant.
6. Put it back together.
Step 1 and 2 complete.

Step 3 and 4. Clean all the things!

Find a broken spring. Wait, which step was that supposed to be?
New step #7: Hope everything works when I put it back together. What would your bet be?

Well, after getting it back together, it worked a little better but the latch was still sticking. Time to learn more about this lock...
Square the door
Jeremy • 09/02/2020 at 23:10 • 3 comments

The door sticks in the frame every time I try to open it. Even worse, the door is solid wood with a wood veneer, so ever time you open it, it pulls the veneer off the bottom.
It's not surprising that the door sticks. This is an old house; it's bound to have settled and taken things out of square. The surprising thing is that the door is still square. Put a level on the top, and the bubble floats in the center! It would appear that the house has settled pretty evenly, but the beams on either side of the door have pulled it down and against the threshold at the bottom of the door frame. This is actually good news; I just need to plane the bottom to keep it from rubbing.

Even better news was that my Dad had a spare electric hand planer laying around I could use.

Preparing the door: Put masking tape down and scoring the veneer to prevent ripping it off.

Plane the bottom by 1/32", lift the [HEAVY] door back onto the hinges, check the fit, take the door off, repeat as necessary.

After several rounds of cutting and checking the fit, the door closed smoothly! I probably took a little more than 1/4" off the bottom by the end of it.
The wood was still looking pretty rough, so the next step was to sand and seal it. In this case I chose to use teak oil.

Now to polish the door hardware. It had a lot of oxidation, so I had to bring out the dremel to get it shining again (I wish I took a before/after photo). I chose to shine the major areas but leave some of the oxidation and tarnish to keep the antique look.

Finish with a couple layers of mineral oil on the hardware to protect the finish and we're done.

Pretty good for the first pass. I'll probably put an extra layer or two of oil on it in the next week or so.
The old house where it all started
Jeremy • 09/02/2020 at 22:54 • 0 comments

About a month ago, I moved into a new [to me] craftsman style home built in 1915. It's one of those homes where every part of it feels like there's history and stories to tell. Like the utterly overgrown greenhouse in the backyard that has been sitting dormant for ~50 years. Or the "doorway to nowhere" that opens to a 4-foot drop from the living room to outside. But I digress...

The front door is large (48" wide) and made of beautiful solid heavy wood with an antique mortise lock. As far as I can tell, the door and lock are entirely original. Over the years, the house has settled, and the door sticks terribly to the frame when opening and closing. Once you get the door open (or closed), the latch of the mortise lock sticks in the open position. At least the deadbolt works.

I figured it would be an easy job: Take the door off the hinges, square it up to the frame, and clean the lock. Join me on this adventure in which I learn way more about old locks than I ever expected.