Hope Springs Eternal

I finally found the missing rim lock for the upstairs closet door. It was outside rusting, naturally. I'd disassembled it months ago and had started cleaning it, but then got interrupted and left it in pieces inside a plastic bucket, along with all the caustic chemicals. Said bucket then got moved to the backyard, where it sat for a few months. I found it purely by accident, when I needed an empty bucket to haul some dirt. Surprise! There's the door lock, all in pieces in the bottom of the bucket!

The additional neglect meant I had to re-clean it all over again before reassembling it. The other problem with this lock is that it's missing its spring mechanism. You can turn the doorknob to open the latch, but when you release the knob it doesn't spring back. You have to manually turn the doorknob both ways, for opening and closing, and that's awkward and unnatural. It's just plain broken, in other words.

Springs for a 120-year-old rim lock are hard to come by. Remarkably, Home Depot doesn't keep them in stock. I could probably source some spring steel from a local metal shop, but they'd make me buy 100 pounds of it. So I improvised.

We had some galvanized flashing in the garage left over from some project or other. It's pretty stiff... and it won't rust... and I can cut it with tin snips... and what's the harm if it doesn't work? It was scrap anyway.

So I cut a little piece of metal and bent it and trimmed it to fit inside the lock. It worked! Once. The latch would snap back after releasing the doorknob, but only the first time I tried it. My little makeshift spring lost its spring and stayed bent after one use.

So I doubled up and made a second piece, alongside the first one. That was better, but...

So I added a third piece to keep the other two company. Between the three of them, they seem to work. They're collectively stiff enough to act as a spring, and they don't seem to come un-sprung with repeated use. And even if they do, I have a lot of that flashing still left.

A little white grease on all the moving parts, and we're as good as new!