Hi, friends. It’s Jeff with Home Repair
Tutor. And today I’m going to share with you how to reinforce an entry door and make
it burglar proof. So why do you want to do this? Well, hey,
anybody can kick open this door and literally come in your house and take your laptop, your
iPod, your iPads in less than 5 minutes. And there’s no way the police are going to get
here that quick. So anyhow, that’s why you want to reinforce
your entry door and feel a lot safer about your home. So let’s get started.
So here’s the deal. I go the Easy Armor door reinforcement kit. And it was a little
bit pricey, it’s like $60 or $70 at Lowe’s. But it comes at three different kinds of shields
along with all the screws that you need to make your door impenetrable and really tough
for even the Incredible Hulk to kick in. So let me show you those parts before we get
started. Here are the three different kinds of shields.
You’ve got the door shield—you’ve got two: one for the dead bolt, one for the lock.
Then you have two hinge shields that go overtop your hinges. You don’t have to remove the
hinges at all. And then, the final and most important thing is this huge piece right here
that is the jam shield. And it’s got all sorts of knockouts in it so you can line it
up with your jam and the straight plates on your jam. So I’ll show you how to install
all this stuff. And they give you—the cool part is—they should give you these screws
for $60 or $70. But they give you all the screws that you need to screw these into place.
So I’ll show you how to do that right now. So before you do anything, you want to take
the hinge shield. You want to stick it in between the door and the jam. And make sure
that it fits because this hinge shield is the same width as the jam shield. You just
want to make sure that it fits along that space. And obviously it does here because
I have more than 1/8” of space between the door and the jam. And this shield is probably
about 1/16” wide. But do this for your door. If this doesn’t
fit, if this is too tight, then maybe this product isn’t the right one for you and
you can take it back. This is the middle hinge, okay? And this is
the hinge you want to work on. You want to remove these two screws that are closest to
the insulation strip here. So remove this one.
First of all guys, look how small this screw is. Oh my gosh! It’s like ½”-¾” in
length. It’s pathetic. Now somebody obviously knew that they wanted
to reinforce this hinge because this one’s about 2-2½” long. But nonetheless, you
want to remove these two screws. The next step is to take a 3½” long screw
that they provide, okay? And screw that through the hinge into the jam and into the supporting
lumber behind this jam. Now they say to pre-drill, but since I’m
using an impact driver, I don’t need to do that, okay?
The next thing that you do is line up the hinge shield so that the hole that is left
behind that’s in the hinge is revealed. You take another 3½” screw, all right,
and you drill that into place such that it’s flush as much as possible.
The next step is to install two more 3½” screws in the hinge shield—one at the top,
and one at the bottom. Now again, you can pre-drill—I’m not going to—but you can
pre-drill if all you have is a regular drill, not an impact driver. Make sure that screw
is flush both on the top and on the bottom. Next thing that you want to do is shut the
door and make sure that this doesn’t prevent the door from closing properly. Now one thing
I will note on this door, because it’s a little bit cheaper, is they did not groove
out a mortise such that the hinge can sit inside that mortise and flush with the door
frame itself. So that could be an issue for you. It could be an issue for me here. But
let’s see if it’ll shut. So it shut. No problem. I’m good to go.
And I don’t have to groove out a mortise on the jam either. You just put this hinge
shield overtop your existing hinge. The next step is to do the same thing for
the bottom hinge. Again, check to see if the door will close. Boom, it does! All right,
all right! So now I’m going to install the jam shield.
And what you need to do is note the position of your strike plates. Here’s the dead bolt
strike plate. Here’s the door lock strike plate, okay? So there are many different knockouts
on the jam shield. And so what you want to do is make sure that you locate a knockout
that corresponds with each strike plate. So look, I’ve got this one and this knockout
that I can easily remove with my thumb, okay? All right.
All right. So now that I know I have everything lined up, you want to shove in the jam shield
as far as possible so it actually fits behind this insulation strip, okay? And then what
you do is mark holes with a pencil like so. So I get a hole here and here and up here.
And you can pre-drill or use an impact driver to get screws into those marked holes.
Instead of pre-drilling, I’m just going to put this screw in here maybe about ½”
and backed it out, okay? Then what I’m going to do is slide the jam shield back into place
and stick a screw in here. And again, this is a 3½” screw, all right?
Okay, there are two more spots on the bottom here that need to be secured with screws.
And there are two more holes at the top of the jam plate. Again, secure them with two
3½” screws. And then once you’re done, just check to
make sure that the door closes with limited interference. Not bad. Not bad.
When you line up the strike plate on the existing dead bolt or door handle, make sure that this
slot lines up with the slot on the Easy Armor plate, okay? Otherwise, the door may not close
properly. You can install these door shields over the
dead bolt and the regular door lock here, okay? Now before you do that, I highly recommend
that you test to see whether or not this can clear the door jam.
Now what I did first was I put the jam shield on. With the jam shield in place, what you
want to do is slide this door shield over the dead bolt and see if it’s going to clear.
And it doesn’t in this case. So there’s not enough room, and I’m not going to be
using these, all right? However, as a last resort, we can do is take
out the tiny screws that hold this in place—both these locks that’s in place—and use the
2½” screws that come with the Easy Armor kit that were meant for the door shield, okay?
So simply just take out these screws, okay? Take out both of these tiny screws and install
the 2½” screws. Do the same thing down here.
All right. That’s it. That’s how you install the Easy Armor door reinforcement kit. I hope
that this video helped you out. Let me know if you have any questions in the
comments section. I’d be more than happy to help you with your own project.
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