How an All Year shed door keep will make locking your shed door a breeze!

Do you ever struggle to lock your shed door?

You attempt to slide the locking bolt across to lock the shed door but the bolt won't slide. It just hits the edge of the old shed door keep and won't move any further.

When you installed the bolt and keep it worked just fine, the bolt slid easily into place and it locked easily. But now just a couple of months later when you came to open the shed the bolt was difficult to slide open and when it came to close the door you had to force the bolt into the supplied shed door keep to make it secure.

It all makes going in and out of the shed a bit of a hassle and takes the edge off an afternoon of otherwise enjoyable afternoon in the garden.

This photo is a bit extreme! But it makes the point that using traditional shed door keeps is a losing game!

What is going on here? Why does this happen? And what is the solution?

There are two reasons why you struggle with the shed door keep supplied with most door bolts.

Firstly, the keeps that are supplied with many shed doors are made with minimal tolerance relative to the size of the bolt. A typical shed door bolt is 12mm in diameter and the shed door keep that it slides into may only be 15mm wide.

Any movement, either way, of more than 1.5mm and the door bolt will bind against the shed door keep.

This shed door keep was already out of adjustment. Despite being part of a quality shed less than a year old.

Secondly many sheds are relatively lightweight structures and move slightly with the seasons as the moisture in the timber swells and shrinks. The movement isn't significant enough to cause problems with the structure or waterproofness of the building, apart from the ability to lock that pesky door!

Why not just move the shed door keep to a different location so that the bolt moves sweetly again?

I and many others have tried this. And it works like a charm, for a while! Then, a few months later as the season turns from dry to wet or from warm to cold you start having difficulty with that pesky bolt again.

You can see from the holes on the right hand side that previous attempts had been made to adjust the shed door keep position

What we have in essence is a door keep that is too small and can't accommodate the seasonal movement of the shed.

The answer therefore isn't to move the keep every few months when the weather changes. But to fit a keep with a bit more tolerance.

Enter the All Year shed door keep

The All Year keep is designed so you don't need to fix your shed door every six months. It works All Year round!

It is designed for 10mm shed door bolts and allows the bolt to move up or down 12.5mm, which is more than enough to accommodate seasonal movement on a well-maintained door.

shed door keep No need for further adjustments. This door will now unlock 'All Year' round. ;-)

How do I fix the All Year shed door keep?

The shed door keep has four holes to secure it to the door frame.

There are two square holes, 7mm across, so suitable for a 6mm dome head square neck bolt. This type of bolt is secured using a hexagonal nut and washer from inside the shed. It isn't possible to rotate the bolt in the square hole as the neck of the bolt prevents rotation. The washer used with the nut on the inside of the shed makes it difficult (if not impossible) to pull out.

The two circular holes are 6mm diameter so suitable for a 5mm wood screw. These could be secured with standard 'posi drive' screws, but for a bit of extra security we supply a couple of non-return screws. Which are installed using a standard screw driver and very difficult, if not impossible, for a potential intruder to remove.

shed door keep The two dome head bolts are the key to the security of this keep