How to Maintain Your Door Locks Well

When it comes to home security, home door locks play an important role in the whole living area. Many people always lock the door after leaving home. While, you may ignore the situation of locks in your room doors. As you find that it is not easy to open your door locks, it is late for you to fix the lock. You need know how to maintain your door locks in daily life. 

 

The simplest method of lock maintenance is to not unnecessarily lock and unlock the device. Each time the lock is used, metal is grinding on metal, causing wear. Commercial door locks are designed to withstand more opening and locking cycles than residential locks, but all locks wear out in this way eventually.

 

How to Maintain Your Door Locks Well in Daily Life

Realign Your Door Locks

Whether your lock is not opening or locking smoothly, there is likely an issue with the alignment of your latch bolt and strike plate. The lock maintenance you need in this case is a realignment. Though this is technically lock maintenance, it will also improve front door security.

 

With a misaligned lock, more force is needed to make the device lock and/or unlock. That additional force lowers the life expectancy of the lock hardware. Lock alignment harms your security beyond damaging the lock, as it can keep a door from reliably locking.

 

The simplest solution in the case of door locks is to raise the strike plate and widen the strike hole in the door frame. Just be careful not to place your new set screw holes too close to the previous ones, as this will make the door vulnerable to kicking and prying.

 

To avoid re-drilling the set screw holes, you can expand the strike plate’s hole by cutting the metal. Just be aware that if your lock alignment has changed, it will almost certainly continue to change. This means this will become a part of your regular lock maintenance.

 

Adjust Your Home Door

Your door sticking is going to cause the same problems like a misaligned lock. But in this case, the door is catching on the frame, so standard lock maintenance is not going to do the trick. Instead of focusing your attention on the lock, you are going to address the door.

 

Wood will expand during instances of extreme weather changes, especially increases in humidity or precipitation. These effects are most pronounced in solid wood doors and solid core doors as opposed to hollow core doors. As a result, the misshapen wood will need to be cut.

 

The road to this kind of door lock maintenance begins with opening and closing the door to see the point where it is catching. Once you find the problematic side, mark with a pencil how much material is in the way. Then you can remove the door and shave it down to the right size.

 

This type of lock maintenance is going to be most difficult when you are looking to secure a sliding glass door. Glass doors are difficult to remove, and the risk of damaging the glass is always high when making adjustments. For these doors, start by lubricating the track before taking the door off.

 

Unblock Your Door Locks

Are you dealing with a clean lock? In some cases, dust and debris can clog the internal components of a door lock and keep the device from working properly. This may be a build-up in the keyway, the crevices of the bolt/latch, or even deeper in the lock.

 

If you have a key stuck in the lock, this could be because the keyway is beginning to overfill. This will reduce the amount of space the key has to freely insert and retract. Similarly, this is true if the bolt or actuator is blocked. The space around these components needs to be clear.

 

How to clean door locks comes down to using the right kind of lubricant, unless you are dealing with larger detritus. If something is jammed in the keyway, use the same methods you would use to remove a broken key from a lock. The most effective of which will be to probe and pull the debris out.

 

When something is jammed into a crevice beyond the point where lubrication or other attempts are effective, disassemble the lock for better access. To clean door locks after they are disassembled, you can probe and pull or lubricate the trouble spots more effectively.

 

We have mentioned three effective methods for people who expect to maintain your door lock well. You can follow the guidance and repair your home door lock properly. And if you meet door lock problems, you can use lock picking kit to solve them quickly and precisely.