A customer in Ashford got in touch because the front door was becoming difficult to lock and asked me to find out what was wrong.
Once I removed the multipoint mechanism from the door, the fault was obvious. The spindle inside the gearbox had failed and was no longer engaging with the rest of the locking system.
The awkward part was that this internal component was no longer sold separately. Even complete replacement systems for this model were becoming difficult to find unless a supplier happened to have forgotten one at the back of a storeroom.
Rather than condemn the whole multipoint mechanism, I used an overnight gearbox from van stock as a donor and carried out what I jokingly called a system transplant of the highest skill and precision.
The repair worked. After rebuilding and refitting the mechanism, the handles and multipoint locking system were operating normally again, and the original door system was saved in a single visit rather than being replaced wholesale.
