Today on Repairs101 I’m going to show you a really common problem — and that’s a door that has a loose door hinge. I’ll show you the most common cause of it and what you can do about it.
Clearance issue
Alright so it’s fairly obvious to me that the cause of the problem is this carpet here. Well I could take the easy way out, that’s for sure. And just get rid of the carpet and tighten up those screws and it’ll be fine. Right? But you know I want to take the door off the hinges and plane the bottom, don’t you? So what I’ll do is: I’ll show you how to take the door off the hinges and put it down. Plane between an eighth and a sixteenth of an inch off the bottom. And we’ll put it back up and see if it doesn’t clear our carpet.
Start at the bottom
So something simple that you need to know about removing a door. Close the door and start here at the bottom. Take out the bottom pin first and then go to the top and remove that so that you’re standing. ‘Cause if the door starts to come down on you… You don’t want to be down here underneath you want to be standing up where you can catch it easily. There we go. We just want to get under the cap of the hinge pin and tap it and tap it and tap it.
OK and that’s all there is to removing a hinge pin, very simple. Now you definitely want to use a proper punch to do this. This one’s one of my favourites, it’s got a nice rubber coating on it for shock absorbing. If you don’t if you can’t find a punch then a cold chisel is also great for the job OK.
Use a punch
OK now so if you don’t have a punch to hit this with you might just try taking the ball-peen. Or even the flat end of your hammer and try just working it up. You see that, it jumped. There we go and out it comes. OK. Never ever, ever use a hammer on the end of your screwdriver. If you hit this with a hammer it could shatter and the shrapnel could go everywhere including into your eyes, leaving you in a lot of trouble. So, and of course you void the warranty if your tools are warranted. You don’t want to do anything that’s going to void the warranty. You know it’s worth it to spend the extra couple of dollars to get something that’s designed to be hit with a hammer. Like a punch or, say, a cold chisel.
Now you see the reason I say do this with the door closed. I’ve got both the hinge pins right here and the door, as you can see, is holding itself in place. So the hinge halves are simply balancing still, one on top of the other. And it’s all being held in place by the door inside the door jamb. Even the latch from the doorknob is adding support on this side keeping it from falling and dropping off. There you go, how easy is that?
Up on blocks
If you’ve got a nice big workbench to put it up on that’s great otherwise maybe some saw horses are what’s best for you. Folding saw horse or one that you make yourself — anything like that will be good. I’m just going to throw it up here on the kitchen counter. There, I’ll bet you didn’t see that coming. OK so here’s a great trick I learned a long time ago. Say you’ve got a problem like this… Where you’ve got a screw that just turns and turns and turns and turns so the hole is stripped.
Repair stripped screw hole
One thing you can do is just upgrade to an oversize screw OK. If you’ve got a stripped out hole like this one you can remove the screw and take an ordinary toothpick like I’ve got here and just shove it in. Break the end of it off and then put your screw in beside it. The piece of wood that your toothpick provides gets jammed right in there really nice and tight and provides for a really solid anchor. And as you can see now that isn’t going to spin anymore.
You take a wooden toothpick — or perhaps two, if you have a lot of space. Break it off in the hole, just tuck it in like that. Break it off into the hole and then take your screw and put it in alongside of that piece of wood. When you do you find that it bites right in and provides for a really nice solid. Oh, look at that — arrrgh — a really nice solid bite on the wall now. So behaving as though it is part of the structure. And it’s holding it all in there by means of compression.
