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I have been going through many parts that I have recently gotten ahold of. However, I don't know what many are or what they do. I ran into this steel part:
It is 0.565 in tall, with an inner diameter of 0.25 in and an outer diameter of 1.25 in.
I'm not sure if it is a thick spacer, a tall washer, or something entirely different.
Does anyone know exactly what it is or what it is for?
Often called Stop collar or shaft collar.
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).
Best Answer
Could be a bushing, or "plain bearing".