LANCASHIRE LOCKSMITH • HOMES & BUSINESSES
If a door has to be lifted, pulled or leaned on before it will lock, it is out of alignment. Adjusting the hinges and keeps usually resolves it from £76. Left alone, the strain falls on the multipoint gearbox, and replacing that starts at £216.
From £76 · call-out and labour rates
Door alignment is the cheapest work we do and the work that prevents the most expensive. A door that needs persuading to lock is telling you the mechanism is under load it was not designed for.
First the handle needs a little more force than it used to. Then the door has to be lifted or pulled towards you to lock. Then the key will only turn at one particular point. Along the way the door starts catching on the frame or rubbing the threshold, and a draught appears where there was not one. None of these is urgent on its own, and together they are a mechanism asking to be looked at before it fails.
uPVC and composite doors move with temperature and humidity, so a door that locked perfectly in July may need lifting by November — exposed and coastal properties move most. Timber doors swell and shrink with the weather. Hinges settle under the weight of the slab, particularly on wide or heavy composite doors. Frames shift as a building settles, and on sloping ground that movement is rarely even.
Most uPVC and composite hinges adjust in three directions — height, compression and lateral — usually with a hex key behind a cap. The keeps in the frame can be moved too. The work is to bring the hooks and bolts back into line with the keeps so they slide in rather than catch, then to set the compression so the door seals without binding. On timber doors it is hinge packing, easing the leading edge and repositioning the keep.
Door alignment is listed from £76, and a full door service — inspection, adjustment, lubrication and a safety check — from £108. Call-out and labour are separate and published on the pricing page. For comparison, a failed multipoint mechanism starts at £216, and it typically fails when the door is locked, from the outside, in bad weather — which adds an emergency entry on top.
Because the fault is alignment rather than the lock. With the door open the hooks and bolts have nothing to engage and move freely. Closed, they have to line up with the keeps in the frame, and a drop of a few millimetres is enough to make them catch.
Yes. Every operation of a binding door loads the gearbox, and that is the part that eventually gives way. Adjusting the door is a fraction of the cost of replacing the mechanism, and it can be booked at daytime rates rather than as an emergency.
You can, and some people do it successfully, but it is easy to make the door worse: over-compressing it strains the mechanism just as binding does, and the three adjustments interact. If you try it, work in small increments and mark the starting position first.
Autumn, before the cold and damp arrive, is the most useful time on an exposed property. Adjusting a door in October is routine work; dealing with it in January usually means it has already failed.
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