Since I moved in the latch on the bathroom door hasn't worked. There isn't a latch plate on the frame, so I went out and bought one of those for 99 cents. Its an old house, and the lock on the door is operated via skeleton key, and since the damn thing wouldn't retreat into the door, I bought a set of two skeleton keys for 2.99. It turned out I didn't really need any of it, but it was four bucks, which doesn't even buy a gallon of gas, so.. Moving on!

Step 1: The Beast Itself.

I took the thing out of the door before I thought to document this, so we are starting from me opening up the case to the worky-bits. This is an old door latch. Just the sort of thing I love to tinker with. Shown below is the innards of the lock, as well as what I thought was going wrong.

Step 2: What It Should Look Like (I Assumed)

The images show how things seemed to go together for me. Apparently someone had taken this apart before, and screwed it all up. Thanks, buddy.

Step 3: How Ever Will This Work?

I bent the piece that was all bent back into shape. Things fit. Which I didn't get an image of... I'm sort of dumb.

Step 4: The Latch Plate.

Once I got the whole shebang back in the door, I did a test fit(with myself in the bathroom, not the best idea). Luckily it worked, and the latch catches on the door frame nicely. it isn't a permanant fix, an I can see that wood giving way after a while.

Note the large hole in the frame. No idea why that is there. It creates problems for adding a latch plate, as you can see in the second image. I've got a solution to that in the works, but nothing concrete. I might add that, and take the mechanism apart again to get pictures of it all working together.