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Securing an exterior door is a priority for many homeowners. If people knew how poorly some of the locking and latching mechanisms were, they might lose sleep at night. Not that the locks are bad mind you, it’s the strike plate that is the weakest link.
The strike plate is the curved metal piece that sits in the door jamb. The latch hits this and closes. The problem is that the strike is usually installed with ¾” screws into the jamb. When the door gets kicked open, the jamb usually splits from the force of the impact, and the door swings open.
A fast fix is to replace these short screws with longer deck screws so that they sink all the way into the house framing. The door can still be kicked in, mind you, but it will take more than one kick.
You can install an armored strike plate for some added sleep. These are beefy strike plates with a larger surface area to spread out more of the impact. You will need to make the hole for it into the strike jamb and then mortise the area for the surrounding lip to sit into. This will use 4 deck screws with each one long enough to screw into the house framing. The unit comes with a template to make the location easy to mark out and install. Just because you have an armored strike plate installed doesn’t mean the door is kick-proof. It just means that it will be more difficult to enter than a door without it.
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