People who move to Elda from the coast often expect the same problems with their locks: salt, corrosion, sand. Those are coastal problems. Elda sits at 395 metres in the Vinalopó valley, nearly 40 kilometres inland, and its climate is dry and steppe-like. There are around 345 mm of rain a year, the temperature runs from about 3 °C to about 30 °C over the year, and on some winter nights it drops below freezing.
What that does to a lock is less obvious than salt, but just as real.
Wood moves, and the lock goes with it
A timber door takes on a little moisture and lets it go again, and it swells and shrinks with the temperature. A door in a sunny stairwell or facing the street can change noticeably between a cold January morning and a July afternoon.
The lock does not move. The latch and the bolt are fixed to the door, and the keeps they shoot into are fixed to the frame. When the door shifts by a millimetre or two, the latch starts rubbing on the keep, and the bolt starts catching on the edge of its hole.
The signs, in the order they usually appear
- The door needs a push or a pull before the key will turn. You stop noticing you do it.
- The key is stiff in one season and fine in another. A clue that it is the door, not the cylinder.
- The latch does not catch when the door swings shut, so it has to be closed firmly.
- The key will not turn at all, usually at the worst possible time, because the bolt is now pressed hard against the side of its keep.
The first three are an adjustment. The fourth is a locked-out evening.
What you can check yourself
- With the door open, turn the key and watch the bolt. If it moves freely open but not shut, the problem is alignment, not the lock.
- Look at the keep on the frame for bright scratch marks. They show exactly where the bolt rubs.
- Notice whether it is worse in the morning or the afternoon, in winter or summer. It helps whoever fixes it.
Do not oil a cylinder with cooking oil or a general household spray. In a dusty climate, an oily cylinder collects grit and gets worse. Cylinders want a dry lubricant made for locks.
What fixing it involves
Usually the keep is moved or filed, the hinges are adjusted so the door hangs true again, or the door is eased where it binds. The lock itself often needs nothing. Caught early, it is a short job.
Owners of flats on the older estates will find more on their doors in the guide to the original doors of the 1960s estates. Out in the countryside, gates and padlocks take the same weather with nothing to shelter them; that is in the finca checklist.