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Door Latches

Next up was the bear claw/Altman latches that I decided to use on the doors. The instructions were pretty good although the pictures tended to be so close up that the context or orientation of the door was a little difficult to determine. I watched several Youtube vids to get a better understanding of the task. I used the template to cut out the latch area on the door. It was basically straight forward. The only change I made was that I only drilled a ¾ inch dia hole instead of a 1 inch hole at the bottom of the bracket. That seemed to be sufficient to put the screw in the link during assembly.

With the cutout(s) complete then I mounted the inner door handle mechanism and the link provided. The link went on top of the handle and that is the way it was designed to be but I really didn't like it so I swapped out the LH & RH handle mechanism, flipped it upside-down and cut and welded the link so that it would attach to the bottom of the mechanism and be located in the existing trough in the door. I also trimmed up the link so it could be put behind the tab on the handle mechanism. This all looked way better to me.

When it was assembled the door then I tested it and it worked just fine. The only two issues that I plan on addressing are that the handle seems to have a hair trigger and it is designed to rotate both directions (one way to open door, one way to lock the door). I think I need to slot the link a little bit so the handle has to travel a bit before it trips the latch release and I need to add a positive stop on the handle mechanism so the handle can only rotate one way. I also need to figure out an internal lock for both doors. I'll add these to my ever growing to-do list.

I was on the fence as to whether or not I was going to use the stock cab portion of the latch (latch bolt and plate) but after breaking off a tap in the cab threads trying to chase them then my mind was made up for me....so cutting out that section of the cab and building a integral latch bolt assembly is being added to the agenda.