doorknobdoors
The lever handle door knob on my front door can be turned either way, but only engages when turned turned one way. Can I make it work in both directions?
At rest, the bolt is engaged, as desired. When the knob is pulled up, the bolt is retracted as desired. But when the knob is pushed down, nothing happens: the bolt remains engaged.
I'm not sure if it matters, but the mechanism on the outside is a handleset:
Related to Doorknob only turns one way, but mine turns it just doesn't engage.
From surfing a bit, it seems Baldwin has a variety of handlesets that work with a limited number of their locksets. If you can't buy just the plate, you might only need to buy the lockset.
It seems to be called a 'Landing Plate'
We’ve had two Baldwin handle sets fail on our new front door in the past six months, and I finally figured out why the manfacturer included a second landing plate with the set.
Basically they must have known it would fail prematurely.
The thumb latch is a lever that sits on a set of little pins set on a brass die casting, shown above, which allows it to toggle up and down. Unfortunately, brass die castings are about making things fast, and such parts typically have crappy structural performance and are prone to stress cracking.
What probably happened is that a tiny crack formed on one side of the casting and propagated every time we squeezed up and down on the handle. One side failed (red arrow) and our door handle starting twisting at an odd angle. Thankfully we replaced it with the second landing plate before we were locked out of the house.
After going through two sets, we bought a new set and discovered that designers finally figured out they needed to reinforce the casting for the load by reinforcing the area where the pin sets (right image).
If you just want the bathroom door held closed, remove the latch mechanism totally, install a dummy knob and use a magnetic closure to hold the door in place.
You do not even need the magnet to touch the matched plate on the stronger ones. If you are using a bit of foam or a vinyl bumper on the door itself, adjust the magnet back from the plate until it is about 1/16 inch away. It will hold without a click.
If you need a lock for other times, use a surface mounted privacy bolt.
Best Answer
MOST door knobs I know of engage the latch in either direction. You may have something broken or installed incorrectly on yours, or someone purposely had it made to do this. In fact, it is considered a "safety issue" to not have the latch retract when pushing the lever DOWN, because if you were trying to get out of the house during a fire, you might be crawling on the floor below the smoke and having to push the lever UP to open the door may be difficult. You should fix/replace it immediately.