Mortise Lock Repair for Dummies

mortise lock assembly

If there's any one takeaway from several years of paging through the "work" of online freelancers, it's that some people are perfectly willing to give advice about totally unfamiliar topics. The advice is free, and too often it's worth exactly what you paid for it. This is especially true of freelancers writing so-called how-to posts when they don't understand the question. Take, for instance, Anne Redler, whose eHow.com post "How to Open a Mortice [sic] Lock" (now at HomeSteady.com) is a classic example.

Redler stuck with the American English version of the word, "mortise," through most of her post (but not all of it), although DMS refused to change the title. Anne even got the description of the lock right:

"...the basic mechanics of the lock include a lock body, with a bolt, that is mounted into a door..."

After that point in her post, however, Redler's inability to think like her OQ got in the way. Once she had offered up the opinion that,

"A mortice lock is excruiatingly [sic] hard to open without a key,"

Redler launched into... how to use a key to open a mortise lock. Now you see why she's here, right? No? Well, Redler is here today because any idiot can open a mortise lock with a key. Hell, Anne even told her readers which way to turn the door knob (Anne, it doesn't' make any difference...), but that's as close as the business grad was able to get.

Our staffers figured that, as is typical of clueless freelancers "answering" how-to questions they lack the knowledge to understand, Redler simply chose the easiest answer: use the key (or, as they might say on Reddit, UTFK).

We submit that her post very likely didn't answer the question, which was far more likely to be "How to pick a mortise lock" or "How to disassemble a mortise lock." We can't answer the first, since we don't have a locksmith on staff. As for the second, a five-second googling session turned up a "how-to" at DoItYourself.com (we won't link to it, but it's not the only information out there).
We figure that if our Dumbass of the Day had spent as much time figuring out what the OQ wanted as we did – less than a minute – she wouldn't be here. But she didn't, so she is. Feh.

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