Jake does it again with Narrow Stile Doors
Narrow Stile Doors:
How to Install a Pivot Deactivator
$9.95
A LocksmithDownloads.com exclusive!
Make hundreds of dollars fixing common door problems!
Are you doing the quick, easy and cheap solution to this door problem? If so, you're cheating yourself out of a profitable job and your customer out of a permanent solution.
A customer calls and tells us their door either won’t lock or is extremely hard to lock. Maybe they even say they have to “lift” up on the door to get it to lock. Quick fix:
Use a file, or Dremel tool to open up the length of the receiver (strike) in the frame by a quarter of an inch, or so! Now the door locks easily. Of course, it’s still dragging on the threshold: but that’s a door problem—not a lock problem.
If one were to file the strike, the door would latch and the customer might be happy and the locksmith could walk away with maybe as much as a hundred dollars, in their pocket.
So for a few minutes worth of “work”, we collect our shekels and leave with dreams of dinner at Tony’s Steak House, and maybe even a small libation, running through our heads. I wonder how broad our smile would be if we realized that we just left three hundred dollars, or more, laying on the sidewalk.
The fact that the door was difficult to lock indicates that the door was sagging away from the pivot or hinge side. The other “symptom” was that the bottom of the door on the latch side was dragging. By filing the strike lower, we only prolong the inevitable door failure.
Anyway, how to correct the problem? Well, there are two ways. One, you could take the door down and remove the malfunctioning closer and replace it with a new one.
Or, you could, as shown in the following photographs use National Door Controls Pivot Deactivator. Using NDC’s pivot deactivator would make the door a single swing rather then a double and necessitate putting a surface mounted closer on the inside.
That’s what I chose to do. And I'm going to show you how. 
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