Door lock & Re: How far did this get?

Article: 8976 of alt.hackers
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: gray@njal.ml.csiro.au (Randall Gray)
Subject: Door lock & Re: How far did this get?
In-Reply-To: mettw@nntp.unsw.EDU.AU's message of 2 Nov 1995 04:25:54 GMT
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: njal
Message-ID: GRAY.95Nov3141048@njal.ml.csiro.au
Sender: news@ml.csiro.au
Organization: CSIRO Marine Labs.
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 03:10:48 GMT
Approved: By fiat
Lines: 73
Status: RO

In article <479h8i$lk5@mirv.unsw.edu.au> mettw@nntp.unsw.EDU.AU
(Matthew Parry) writes:

	<snickersnack>

   up the hill (Isn't lazyness the true sign of a hacker?).  So I

	<snickersnack>

No it isn`t.  Most hackers are anything *but* lazy.

You know, it is terribly hard to report on hacks.  So many of the
postings here suggest that the authors find it difficult to dredge
their memory for something worthy of the epithet.  I know *I* do few
things I feel I can call a hack.

Now for my contribution.

The door to our workshop at home had one of the old latch/lock
combinations which are locked and unlocked with a skeleton key.  The
loking mechanism was completely unused (no key, no hole for the
bolt).	Now, we'd been talking about needing to lock the workshop
since the insurance companies don't insure things that aren't locked
away, so I thought to myself "Hmm".

I took apart the lock and found that one of the parts of the locking
mechanism was badly warped.  It was made of cast brass, and I assume
it was warped from years of tension applied by a spring.  The bit in
question is drawn below in it's unwarped form:





	 _______________________________________
	|     :		  _________/\_________	|
	|     :		 |		      | |
	|     :		 |_________  _________| |
	|_____:____________________\/___________|

	  Bolt			  Key catches
	  body			   here

I ended up manufacturing one of the two "arms"on the RHS of the
diagram out of a large aluminium heat sink, cutting the bolt body off,
and cutting a recess so that the aluminium part could be pop-rivetted
flush with the surfaces of the bolt body.

	       V
	 ___________________________...
	|    |______________________...
	|	  |
	|_________|
	       ^



Where V/^ marks the location of the pop rivet.	Once that was in and
notionally working I had to cut a key to work it.  Heat sink to the
rescue again.

All in all there was lots of hacksaw work and filing and a little
imagination, but not as much ingenuity as I'd have liked.

Later that week I found another such lock (different maker) buried in
a paddock with it's internal spring broken.  I plan to make a new
spring out of an old hacksaw blade, but that won't count since I'll
fire up the forge to bend & temper it.


--
___________________________________________________________________
Randall Gray	gray@ml.csiro.au	CSIRO Division of Fisheries

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