Hi! I’m Bob Smith with Home Remodel Workshop.
Most people know how to put in a door handle like this, it’s just a matter of getting the right sized drill bits, a 2 and an 8 inch hole, and a 7/8 and a little bit of chisel on around here, but what if you live in an older home that has the older mortise style locks? Well you actually have to take out a pretty good chunk of meat on a door. Now there are set ups for this, that are several dollars that you can buy, by the time you get the brace, the router, the plunge router, all the stuff you can buy, I got a couple of simple little tips that I could show you where you could possibly do this without all of that.
Nowadays, in the older type houses, no one throws away their hardware anymore. They come in to find out that the truer they can keep their house, to the original set up, the better it is. So, here is pretty much a close up look, now this is for a patio door, I realized that, but this is a mortise style lock. Where you need to take out a fair amount of material, out of the door to allow this to fit in, but as you can see on the sides, it doesn’t give you a whole lot of margin for air.
Now, although I have the instructions for this mortise patio lock, I’m not going to use them. I’m going to pretend like I’m re-using a old mortise lock that came out of an existing door, I’m putting in a new one. The best way to figure out the thickness that you need for this mortise lock is to just take a spade bit and lay it right over top the widest part of the lock. If you want it to be just slightly bigger, then with the lock, but nowhere near the thickness of this little lip here on the edge. Now, taking your mortise lock, and holding it up so that the plate is flashed with the edge of the door, what you want to do is you want to go below the hole that’s going to anchor the mortise lock in the door but above the closest obstruction, and you want to put a mark. You want to do the same thing on the bottom, and then in the back, you measure just slightly beyond what it would take for this to bottom out.
Drilling just slightly too deep is much better than not drilling deep enough, and then put a mark back there. Once you have those 3 marks, you now have the width of your cut, and the depth of your cut. Simply go ahead and take your measurements, and from the front edge of the door it’s going to be back an inch and a quarter, and from total top to bottom, I’m going to need to cut out 4 inches. Now I do realize I’m doing this into the side of a 2 x 4 stud because unfortunately at the moment, I don’t have any extra doors sitting around, but I really wanted to show you guys how to do this. So, what I did was I blackened out this side of the stud to represent a typical door thickness. So, what I did at this point was I took the two marks that were on the side of door and I brought them around to the front which is 4 inches wide.
Then what I did was I took my door thickness and I divided it in half. Now, I know I’m going to want a half inch deep hole or a half inch wide hole that goes one or one quarter inch deep to fit that mortis. The way I began was, I take my spade bit, and I’m going to drill a multiple set of holes all the way down this line. Now, I took my tape, and I put it at an inch of a quarter thicknesses from this point here where it’s going to make the bottom of the hole flat. Now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to drill a multiple set of holes, but they can’t overlap, because if they overlap, they’re going to start running to each other. So I want to keep the hole separated enough so that I still have solid drilling material to go in. Now I want to line it up nice and square with the front, and start drilling these holes. Now I have my multiple set of holes drilled, all one on top of each other. I hold my mortis lock up to make sure that as it is, these two screws here are the widest point, and make sure that they’re actually going to line up with that hole. But it’s hardly going to fit in there. I mean it’s pretty obvious at this point I guess I could take out a sharp chisel and I could start working on this, but then there is always a chance that you could split out the sides of the door.
I have another tool I’d like to share. What I have here is a standard drill bit. It’s got the twisted cut steel that goes all the way to the top. It’s made for just drilling holes straight in. Now what this one has here it starts out the same in the beginning, but then all of a sudden it looks like it has some kind of an industrial accident here which tore up all the sides. Now what this is, is this is a side cutting drill bit. Not only is it made to drill straight through, but you can also elongate holes or smooth out sides of elongated holes. This is what we are going to use to make our notch.
Now, I’m not trying to mislead you while I was off camera here, it took me, I probably worked on this hole for about 10 minutes to get it to where I want it. I’ve done several tests fits to make sure that it goes in nice and easy, and clean, that is centered up real nice, and I didn’t have to do any trimming. I’m not going to let this thing be in a twist or anything before it goes in. I’m going to make sure that my hole is wide enough in the back that it’s not pulling us off to one side. But now I got it exactly where I want it, and all I have to do is take my pencil, go ahead and holding this down tight, mark around the outside of this thickness of this mortise piece, and then what I’m going to do is I’m going to take my chisel and I’m going to chisel right along that line until I get this thickness, of this, so that this will be nice and flashed with the door.
You know, even some times us professionals, you can’t always get every tool you need to do every job. To buy a mortise set up that anchors onto a door and works with the plunge router. It’s probably a, I said thousand but it’s probably $800.00-$850.00 set up. It’s something I’ve maybe done twice in my career, and if I had an alternative like this to use, which is where I found this bit, I have carrying this bit around for a long time, and for some reason, never thought of making a video of it, and then, I was looking through my drill box, came across it, I thought maybe you’d like to see it too.
I’m Bob Smith with Home Remodel Workshop, hope you had appreciated this tip, and we’ll catch on the next one. Thanks!
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