OK, this is my first Fail blog. It’s a fail because I failed to fix the actual problem despite doing a bunch of work towards that goal.

My front door is a Dutch Door. That’s a type of door with two halves that can move independently. )

Here’s the problem: the locking mechanism to keep the two halves together has barely any clearance. You can see from the photo that clearly an attempt was made to fix this in the past.

Seemed to be an alignment problem to me. Specifically, the bottom half sagging at the top hinge.

There are a lot of YouTube videos and internet articles about bending the knuckles on your hinges, but this wasn’t a viable option for me since bending the knuckles on the door side didn’t do much, and bending the knuckles on the trim side isn’t really feasible because of the thickness of my trim.

So instead, I bought a replacement hinge. It seemed like this would fix it. Look at how tight that hinge is!

FYI door hinges are measured in length and radius of the corners. This is a 4 inch, 1/4 inch corner radius in Satin Nickel finish.

Time to get the tools.

I realized after the fact that I didn’t need to pop out the hinge pin on the old hinge, but I did it anyway. This was a bad omen I suppose of how this project was going to go.

Popping out a hinge pin basically involves putting something underneath the hinge pin and hammering it. In this case, I have a spare hinge pin that I use to hammer up. But first! Painter’s tape to help protect the area from damage.

After knocking it a little out, I got the diagonal pliers to pull it out the rest of the way, mostly to not risk getting the pin I was hammering stuck inside the hinge. Good thing I put the painter’s tape there because I ended up accidentally pushing into the door!

OK next order of business is to open the door up and stabilize it so I can switch out the hinge. The Rhino is a really fun tool to use, not gonna lie.

Here’s what we’re working with, before and after cleaning things up:

I wanted to use at least a couple 2 1/4 inch wood screws to really help push this hinge into the wall and keep it steady. By the way, door hinge fasteners (screws) are weird. They’re actually 9 gauge, which isn’t a typical gauge. Fastener gauges usually go from 6 to 8 to 10, then they switch to diamater inches, 1/4, 1/2, etc. And, typically door hinges come stock with 3/4 inch or 1 inch long 9 gauge fasteners. So, a recommended practice to really stabilize your hinges is to use 2+ inch.

So I discovered something weird whilst unscrewing the screws on the frame. If you look closely you can see that the top screw there is actually the wrong finish. It’s stainless steel, not satin nickel.

So, once again I find evidence that someone tried to fix this problem already. That top screw is actually 2 inch long, it’s also a 10 gauge. Basically it’s a standard 2 inch wood screw rather than a hinge screw since hinge screws are always 9 gauge.

Fun times. So many hacks. Anyway, I took the rest out. This magnetic wrist thing is great when dealing with tons of screws by the way.

I popped out the old hinge and discovered some truly weird shit

Seriously, wtf. There’s an extra, stripped screw hole in the middle and there are two fasteners just…holding the frame to the stud I guess? So weird. Anyway, whatever, here’s a quick comparison of the old, 10 gauge 2 inch screw vs the 9 gauge 2 1/4 inch I planned to use to replace it.

Time to start screwing in the new hinge

I actually use the impact driver most of the way, but hand screw the rest so I can get a sense of what the bite is like and whether I need to change screws or fill in a hole with wood filler, etc.

The last screw on the door side was being a pain. It seemed to be misaligned, and after attempting to put in my 1 inch screws a couple times and the 2 1/4 once (It got stuck most of the way in and wouldn’t go further), I decided to re-use the 2 inch screw from the trim side on the bottom of the door side.

OK after that’s done, it’s time to deflate the Rhino and check the alignment.

Super sad. The new hinge is now just as expanded as the old hinge. I guess the screw holes and the positioning of them were the actual problem. I don’t have a table clamp at the moment, but if I had to go back and redo this, I’d pre-bend the trim side about 1/8 inch to get better dutch door lock alignment.

Oh well. Best I can do at this point is to fallback to some knuckle bending.

It’s about the same clearance as when I started 😭 Lesson learned. Do a more thorough diagnosis before addressing symptoms.

I still want to buy a table clamp, take off that hinge, and bend it to compensate, but now I’m worried that all of the screw holes holding the hinge in place will get stripped from over use. Curses!