... this knob, it is tarnished, and full of holes.
[the travesty of Joel Schumacher aside]
I spend much of the 4 hours of free time last night replacing the knobs within my house. These knobs that were replaced could very well be the original knobs installed when the house was first erected (circa mid-1950's)
I (or we, rather) would not have been such snobs about the knobs except for the fact that they were indeed brass, and very dull and very dirty looking...
[Note: we have nothing against brass, but we are more inclined towards silver rather than gold, so we went with the satin polished chrome instead.]
Replacing door knobs is quite simple. I have done it on numerous occasions. But due to the age of the door knobs in question, the task was sorely underestimated.
You see, to install a door knob you require several things:
- the door
- the door knob assembly
- Cross-bore, edge-bore, and latch bore.
- the doorframe
- tools
The door, having already been installed, I thought it would be the simple replacement of the door knob assembly.
but noooooooo.
Since the original knobs were old school, the cross bolt screwed directly into the knob, eliminating the need to secure the back-plates of the two sides to each other. (I guess you can save on metal doing it this way) The old cross bolt only required a three-quarter inch cross-bore, whereas the new knobs require a 2-1/8 inch cross-bore.
Again, simple enough...
except for, not really.
The drill bit that used to create a 2-1/8 inch cross bore resembles a metal cup with teeth that has a drill bit stickin through the center. That center drill bit is used to guide the cup so that you can accurately determine the center of the large hole you are about to put in a perfectly fine piece of wood.
The problem is that the guiding bit is only one-half an inch.
One-quarter of an inch never looked so big.
my first attempt at boring the hole resulted a very scratched up door. I could not center the stupid drill very easily, so the drill kept getting pushed out of placed. Think etch-a-sketch... [whoa... I hope that did not date me]
the first one took a long time... after that, I figured out how to grind out a groove and use that as a guide, although it was not quite as accurate as the center drill bit would have been.
One thing that kept annoying me though, was friction. Granted, that friction accounts for the fact that my drill bits remain in place in the drill, but it also added to the amount of time required as well as snapping one of my drill bits in half. (that could have been just shoddy craftsmanship though...)
In any case, the back-plates for the replacement knobs were (thankfully) 2-1/4 inches in diameter, which was sufficient enough to cover any and all of the miscalculations I might have made.
... ... ...
so, that must have been incredibly stimulating for you. I hope this edition of "This Old House with Ryan" has been enjoyable for you as it was for me!
Next week: Painting and Trim Replacement! :-P
Good bye, and thanks for reading!
