Redux.
Several years ago (about 6?) I posted about my trials with a door handle. Well, it happened again recently. Handle started to “flop”. It wouldn’t return to its “home” position. Then, as now, I deduced a spring had broken. This time I knew which one. But I disassembled it anyway, took a photo, and contacted the manufacturer informing them that their torsion spring had broken. Again. (Poor design…I mean, it’s clever, but not robust…eventually the little hook on the spring is going to break).
So they sent me pretty much all the pieces to completely rebuild the mechanism. I picked out the spring, and set the rest aside “in case something else goes wrong in the future”.
There is a collar that fits into a groove that holds the entire mechanism together. Sorta like a horseshoe shape. Removed that, plus the piece that spring acts upon, and then the broken spring. Set the new spring in place, dreading the effort that I was about to expend to get the torsion spring “loaded”, when I realized there was an easier way. Since both hooks need to be on the same side, I just pushed the spring from that side. The hooks hooked, and the body of the spring I pushed over and down to settle it into place. Last time I spent an hour on just this bit. This step only required about 10 seconds, if that.
The trick was then getting the piece the spring acts upon back into place. One of the hooks has to hook it. Needle nose to the rescue. Wedged the hook away from the body of the mechanism, slid the piece into place, removed the needle nose so the spring set as it should, put the collar back in it’s groove, and done. Well, I had to put the mechanism back on the door, and put the handle back, but that was trivial. All-told, probably about half an hour.
They didn’t send instructions (when I asked, they said they didn’t have any to send). But that realization about the spring saved me a lot of grief.
1poorguy