A neighbour from Ashford asked whether I could look at the front-door lock on one of his rental properties in NW London because the tenant was finding it difficult to operate.
After agreeing that travelling into NW London would cost him slightly more than a couple of beers, I arranged a suitable time directly with the tenant.
The lock was working, but it felt rough and clearly needed attention. Once I started removing it, I found another familiar problem: the original installation had not been particularly good.
Nothing inside the lock was actually broken, so replacement parts were not necessary. I stripped the mechanism down, cleaned it, lubricated the moving components and realigned the lock before putting everything back together.
The result was a much smoother operation without replacing the existing hardware.
I would have preferred to reinstate every security fixing exactly as the manufacturer intended, but previous work on the door had damaged the installation area badly enough that this would have required repositioning the lock completely. That was outside the scope of what the landlord wanted done, so I repaired and adjusted the existing setup as far as the door condition reasonably allowed.
