This is an update on my ongoing garage workshop conversion: it’s going well! However…
Today, I reinstalled an old Yale Doorman V2N NFC lock I used to have on my front door at my previous house. I figured it’d be a nice lock to put on the new workshop’s door, so I can leave the garage open but keep the workshop locked.
The door in the workshop is an exterior door. The reason for this is because the workshop will be heated, but the garage isn’t. So I need an exterior door for the insulation.
However, unlike a “true” exterior door, this one opens inward, for a good reason: if there’s a car in the garage, I won’t be able to open the door if it swings outward. Exterior doors legally have to open outward here, but this one is installed in reverse, to open inward - inside the heated workshop. And that, my friends, almost made me go insane today.
I made the mortise in the door to accommodate the lock core. It took a while to do this cleanly, but that went well.
Then I installed the outdoor unit (with the outside handle, keyboard and NFC reader), the indoor unit (with inside handle, batteries and PCB) and… strange: the outside handle’s spindle was too short the and inside handle’s spindle was too long…
Oh yeah… The door is installed in reverse: the outdoor unit is in fact installed in the normally indoor-facing side of the door, and the indoor unit on the normally outdoor-facing side.
No matter: I swapped the handles (I couldn’t just swap the spindles, they’re part of the handles and they’re spring-loaded). That took a while too, because they’re held in place by circlips, and sure enough, I don’t have the proper circlip pliers.
I reinstalled everything. plopped the batteries in and… damn: the lock works, but the outside handle permanently opens the lock, while the inside handle is the one that’s controlled by the NFC reader. Kind of useless…
Of course! The lock core is set to let the indoor handle always open the door, and control only whether the outdoor handle is allowed to retract the bolt. But again, the door is installed in reverse. So now the indoor handle is the one that’s controlled by the lock 🙁
I looked at the manual to find out if the lock core could be reversed also, but I didn’t find anything. I looked online too, but found nothing. Damn…
So I unscrewed everything, removed the lock core, considered giving up for 5 seconds, then reconsidered and proceeded to open the core carefully, in the vague hope that I could reverse it somehow.
And… as soon as I lifted the top cover, the lock core literally exploded, throwing springs and parts everywhere.
DAMN!
I gathered all the parts on the floor, then tried to reverse-engineer how they originally fit together. Eventually, after much head-scratching, I figured it out. And as I worked out how the lock core worked, I realized there was a tiny screw I could have reinstalled on the other side to reverse the core without opening it: it was there all along, just undocumented, because outside doors in my area are required by law to open outward. So I guess Abloy didn’t document the feature, because nobody really needed it. Just odd people like me, who install doors the wrong way round…
After 2 hours, I managed to put it back together (reversed), holding 4 springs in tension and trying to prevent the bolt and its sear from flying apart again with one hand, while I carefully reinstalled the cover that held everything together. It was really, REALLY difficult to put back together: clearly this thing was manufactured with a jig, and I didn’t have the jig. But… I did it 🙂
And here is the lock all reinstalled in all its reversed glory:
