Locksmithing

In the winter the Red House has two doors, one on the outside of the doorway, and another on the inside. This is common in older houses in Sweden, as a way of keeping the warmth inside even in the colder parts of winter. In the summer the inner door is taken away and getting in and out becomes easier.  In modern houses with modern doors one well-insulated door does the job year-round.
Anyway, double doors means double handles and double mechanisms, and both stopped working on the Red House a while back. With visitors arriving in a week we decided they needed a door that didn't need fiddling with to make it stay shut. I grabbed the screwdrivers, WD40, old newspaper and paper towels and removed and opened up the mechanisms.
I like figuring out how things work and these old locks are reasonabley simple so I played around with them to check exactly what moved what. As I was doing that one piece exploded away and flew into the corner of the room. After finding it and working out where fitted in I was a little more careful with those spring-loaded parts. Having worked out how they should function I photographed them, as a reminder in case I lost my way. Finally I dismantled them and gave them a good clean.
I got the one shown in the extra working properly, and in fact it works more smoothly than it ever has while we've lived here. The coiled spring that returns the handle to its original position had broken, so I pinched the good spring from the other mechanism and then it worked. I also cleaned out the 40-50 years worth of accumaled dust, metal filings, and dead flies, and sprayed WD40 liberally around. Reassembled and in place it worked like a dream.
On the second mechanism, shown in the main blip, the brass piece at the top is so worn that it no longer opens the latchbolt fully when we use the handle, so the door requires some persuasion to open at all. Since it couldn't be fixed it made sense to use its spring to fix the first lock.
Next week I'll take a trip to the real locksmiths and see if they can sell me a spare part or two, alternatively sell me a new lock. The woman who works there loves fixing old locks even more than we do. The last time we went in we wanted to buy a new lock for our cellar, and only took the old one in (not working and keyless) to show the size we needed. She more-or-less refused to sell us a new one, insisting her locksmith associate could mend the old one and find a suitable key. A couple of weeks later we returned to find the old lock working well, with a key. She charged us £30, about one tenth the price of a new basic lock. Now that's what I call service - I hope she's still working there!