Installing a deadbolt lock in an M35 door

Planning to go on a road trip and having no easy way to lock up the truck's cab, I decided to try putting a deadbolt in the door. The driver door on the truck is pretty rusty in the bottom, so I decided it would be no great loss if I messed it up a bit. This turned out to be more of a challenge than it might seem like. First, the deadbolt locks are made for doors about 1.75" thick. The m35 door is substantially thicker. A piece of a 2x4 was cut and bored to accept and mount the lock assembly. Because the outside part of the lock has to be flush on the door, the bolt is going to end up being too close to the outside of the door, resulting in the bolt hitting right in the center of where the little 1/2" step on the cab door-frame is. To get around this, one of the metal brackets from the lock kit was bolted to the cab frame. Its position was adjusted so that the bolt fits snugly against outer inside dimension of the bracket. It was real hard to measure this out, so i used some tape to hold the bracket in place, shut the door, and operated the lock, and adjusted the position of the bracket. Then I used two large countersink-head bolts to secure it after drilling the holes. The difficult part of this was getting the nuts on the bottoms of the bolts since the frame is enclosed. I did it by using masking tape to stick the nut to a finger and get it through the 1" deadbolt bolt-hole down under there and started. The deadbolt's bolt is 3/4" diameter so the 1" hole let me have a little slack to work with, and place the bracket so it all fits tight once it was bolted up. A deadbolt is supposed to retain the bolt in one position or another, but in this case, I guess my inexperience shows, and I found that a condition could rarely occur where the bolt is not completely in the "up" position, and it could vibrate and fall down into the 'locked' position. Therefore the inside knob was installed, to avoid being locked in the truck and having to get out the passenger side. In order to get the knob to fit, I had to cut a little square area out of the inside panel of the door. To keep water out of the lock, I glued a piece of material over the hole in the top of the 2x4 section and sealed it up. It would have been better to use some kind of material other than wood, since wood will hold moisture, but it was what was on hand at the time. The door didn't want to close as tightly as it should, and this is particular to this door itself. I got around this by removing the rubber weatherstripping along the bottom. Like I say my door is messed up to begin with. All in all, the functionality of the locking is perfect, but the job is a bit messy and unsightly. Maybe someone else could do better with better tools and the ability to make or modify a few parts for the storebought lock. It was a good experiment and when it's locked, there is no way for someone to get into the truck without removing the door hinges. (hey if they want in they'll get in no matter what you do).

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