How to Fix a Broken Key Handle

Fixing something by yourself gives you a great feeling, where you will discover many tricks and experience in fixing something. Last week while I was opening my room door, unfortunately I broke my key so I was unable to use it anymore. I decided to fix it! by myself.

In this instructable you will need:

• piece of wood with 4cm length and 2cm width.
• saw
• drill
• glue(white glue or super glue)
• wood dust
• pen torch
• sandpaper

As you can see in the above pictures that the handle of the key is broken. Without this handle, the key is useless because if we study the process of opening a door with a key we can conclude that all force given by the hand will transfer through this handle and its hinge. So it will be hard to make a force on the broken key to rotate it in the lock.

In this step, you may take your own dimensions for the handle according to the key that you have, so make sure to have the right measurements before start working. In my case, I saw a piece of dimensions 4cm in length and 2cm in width from a strong Oak-wood.

Before the drilling process, you must mark the center of the wooden piece by taking the perfect measurements of the key stem with the wooden handle.

This step is pretty easy, first set your drill with a 7mm bit (again it may differ according to the measurements of the key stem.), then drill the marked center slowly to the have of the wooden handle about 1cm inside.

This step has a new trick that you may not know it, so what happens here is that reuse the Saw-Dust of wood and mix them with white glue or superglue.

This mixture characterized by the durability where it makes a strong layer between the two surfaces and closes the gaps between the surfaces.

I use in one of my other projects: in the 3rd step wooden hand knife

Add to the drilled hole the mixture you have made from saw-dust and superglue and then insert the stem of the key through the hole. Their is another method that I use by putting the saw-dust first in the hole then add glue on them to stick the stem.

When you be sure that the handle sticks well in the key then it is ready for sanding, In the sanding process I use a rough sand tool then I used P220 sandpaper and sand it very well.

To look more attractive I polish the wooden handle where it will be better and it will preserve it.

This step is optional where it will make it more attractive, but be sure that if you want to apply this you must do it before polishing using a pen torch.