Hi Folks, My wife and I are having a bit of trouble installing a handle for a storm door.
For those not familiar with these handles, there are two parts to them. The first part, the exterior handle, has a button at the top, followed by an elongated handle that one would use to pull the door open. The button at the top depresses the latch, which frees the door to be opened. The inside part of the handle, is basically a lever, at a ninety degree angle to the handle, usually to the one side or the other, depending on which side your storm door opens up. When you press the lever forward, it releases the latch, which keeps the door closed via a two to three inch rounded flap that mounts to the door frame. When the door is closed, and the handles are left alone, there is a triangular latch, which catches on the long piece of rounded metal attached to the door frame, , that keeps the door from opening. This latch looks like if you placed your hands together, palms together, then opened out your fingers to the right. If you keep your fingers open, this is what the latch looks like. Sorry if I'm not explaining it right. In any case, aside from taking us eighty-five years to find the holes in the exterior part of the handle with the mounting screws, our problem is after we've found and screwed in the mounting screws. You see, as long as we keep the two sides of the handle loose, the handle works properly, in other words, you press the button on the outside of the door, or push the lever on the inside of the door, the latch releases the door, and we can open it just fine. The problem is when we go to tighten the screws, the latch pretty much freezes up on us. You can't press the button outside, nor push the lever inside. There is a latch lock, which is essentially a little flange, about two or three eighths of an inch wide, which is at the top of the inside lever, and this can be used to lock up the door so it can't be opened from the outside. Well, this locking mechanism is frozen, and it won't move from side to side like it's supposed to, however, if you loosen up the screws, the whole works function properly. I just don't get it. My wife is convinced that the hardware needs a spacer between the inside lever part, and the door proper, so there is some space between the two parts of the handle, but I'm afraid that the screws won't reach the other side of the handle if we place too much space between the two parts of the handle. I should also point out that as we screw in to tighten the screws, we can see, or should I say, I can feel the latch start to close with every turn of the screw driver. The more we tighten, the more the latch tightens. I have installed a number of these suckers, and have never had any trouble like this. I have also never had to place a spacer between the two parts of the handle, hence my confusion. Does anyone have any ideas? I've faced this problem with regular door knobs, and all it took was a turn of the inside pin, which then released the mechanism enough to allow the door knob to turn, but this handle won't allow me to do that. Any help on this would surely be appreciated. Victor Gouveia [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
