A customer in Hampton got in touch about her front door. It would lock and unlock, but the latch wouldn’t hold the door closed.
Once on site, my first thought was that the gearbox had failed and would need replacing. A closer look changed that completely. The mechanism had a snib — basically a hold-back function for the latch — and it had been left engaged.
What threw me off initially was that the handles fitted to the door didn’t have the thumb-turn normally used to operate that function. The customer explained that the handles had been changed at some point in the past and she had never known the hold-back feature existed.
Once the snib was released, the gearbox worked exactly as it should.
I explained that the handles weren’t really the correct type for that mechanism and offered to replace them, but she was happy to leave them as they were. I also warned her that the same thing could happen again. She wasn’t worried 😀.
The important bit was that the gearbox was perfectly serviceable, so there was no reason to replace an expensive part just because the fault initially looked worse than it was.
