I am learning more French than I really want to as I managed to lock our newly arrived guests in this morning!
I need what I’ve learnt is a serrure à appliquer for the shutters to the front door to our gite. But what I would like it to have in the inside if possible is a knob that one turns to undo the lock whereas at the moment there is a key hole on both side of the shutter.
I’ve tried googling pictures of locks but not sure I’ve got the right French word for it so I can explain to the guy in our brico this afternoon.
Is it just “bouton”?
Thanks for any suggestions.
The verrou is the bolt or bar thingy you can turn by hand or with a key and a serrure is a keyhole, with pins etc to action a lock. Or so I think. There are targettes as well which are little bolts
Take vary careful measurements of them as there are many different sizes of the protrusion of the lock cylinder which should match the thickness of the door.
Including the lockplate. Not all of the cylinders are equal distance either, could be longer one side to the other so measure from the screw that holds the cylinder in place eg. 40/30mm, 40/50mm etc
As it’s surface mounted I don’t need to worry about the screw through the door that holds the cylinder in place (there isn’t one), but, yes, I do need to worry about the thickness of the door.
Frustratingly, I also need to worry about the dimensions of the cylinder itself. The current one is skinny so the hole through the door is skinny.
Also the current one has an inordinate number of screws to hold it in place - eight in all for heavens sake - whereas most current ones seem to have four - which means of course the holes in the door for the screws are going to be in the wrong place.
I can see I’m going to have to move the new lock and start drilling holes from scratch.
These are mounted on the inside face of the door and have a cylinder that passes all of the way to the front - they are not like a euro lock cylinder (but just to add confusion you can get them with euro lock cylinders, but they are rare).
Finally coming back to this and tearing my hair out!
I need a 30 mm cylinder which I am finding ok, but the other single most important dimension is the total length of the “tongue” which needs to be around 135mm. Yet the latter seems to be a measurement that is not provided in the supplier marketing material.
Also the words “cyclop” and “vachette” come up in the descriptions and I cannot find any sensible translation.
Vachette is a brand name and Cyclops is a specific lock in their range with Euro cylinder.
Does 135mm refer to the overall length of the tongue? Throw refers to how far the tongue travels between locked and unlocked and 135 mm seems excessive.
Thanks for your help. Yes it’s the overall length. I want to use the existing hole for the cylinder if possible and I have a critical distance where too short a tongue means that it does not reach across the gap between the two shutters and too long and the tongue cannot go as far as it needs to because it’s being obstructed by the shutter furniture.
You need to ascertain how much travel is need for the tongue to engage the keep i.e. the lock to work so measure your existing lock to check the dimensions.
Most locks of this type seem to have a tongue of 110mm overall length and 40mm throw from unlocked to locked.
Heavens that’s a bit technical.
I went into our local brico where I bought the new lock that’s too long and the guy there suggested I used an angle grinder and cut the tongue to the length I want - which terrifies me!
Thanks Vero. I’ve got a serrurier d’urgence coming out tomorrow to fix the front door serrure multi-point. I’ll get him to look at this at the same time.
It’s been a rocky start to the season this year, not helped by “helpful” guests who think they know what they are doing and just make things worse.
Bolt throw is usually about 20mm on a high security rated lock, love the two turn French locks that do this. Cheap locks in the UK are only 12-15mm throw.
