Case study · Sentinel House, Peasholme Green, York YO1
Why the secondary leaf of a double door matters as much as the lock
On a double entrance the lock does half the job. The active leaf throws its bolt sideways into the meeting stile of the other door, so unless that secondary leaf is itself anchored to the frame, the pair simply pivots open together. That anchoring is the shoot bolt: a flush-fitting lever mechanism mortised into the edge of the door, driving a rod down into a keep in the threshold (and, on taller doors, a second rod up into the head). It is thrown once in the morning and once at night, it is invisible when the doors are shut, and nobody thinks about it until a visitor leans on the “wrong” door and it moves.
At Sentinel House the lever had become loose and the rod no longer dropped the full distance into the keep. The removed bolt is in the photographs: the slide inside the body had worn along its track and the cam that converts the lever movement into rod travel had rounded off, so the bolt would seat with a push but back out again with a knock on the door. On heavy bronze-anodised aluminium leaves like these, the inertia of the door does the rest. The original transom closers we replaced in the spring had worn in the same way for the same reason — thirty years of a heavy door in a busy professional office.
Replacing a flush bolt with the leaf off
Because the bolt body and its rod sit inside the stile of the door, the only sensible way to change one is with the leaf out of the frame. The engineer lifted the secondary door off its bottom pivot — one of the new pivots from the earlier visit — and laid it flat across the back of the van with the brush seal uppermost, slid the old body and rod out of the mortice, cleaned the pocket and fitted the new flush bolt and rod. The clip on this page of the new lever being worked in the door edge was taken at that stage, before the leaf went back on its pivot and the rod was checked for a full, clean throw into the threshold keep. The closer and pivot settings from the spring were untouched.
Work completed at Sentinel House
- Survey — shoot bolt engagement checked on the secondary leaf; lever found slack and the rod short of the keep.
- Leaf removal — secondary leaf lifted off its bottom pivot and laid flat for access to the stile.
- Flush bolt — worn bolt body and rod removed; mortice cleaned; new flush shoot bolt and rod fitted.
- Re-hang and test — leaf re-hung, bolt throw into the threshold keep tested, lock on the active leaf checked against the secondary leaf.
- Office — open throughout; work completed in a morning.
Commercial door hardware repairs across York
Shoot bolts, panic bolts, mortice locks, cylinders and keeps wear out on the same timetable as closers and pivots, and Commercial Door Maintenance and Security Ltd replaces them on aluminium, timber and steel doors across York — the professional offices around Peasholme Green and the Minster, the station hotels, Monks Cross and Clifton Moor, and out to Harrogate, Selby and Tadcaster. A clear photograph of the door edge is usually enough to identify the pattern, so send it over and we will quote the same day. We also cover aluminium door repairs and transom closers across North Yorkshire.
