Door jamb repair.

[cqaigy2]

A revisit. I’ve hung doors before but they were interior ones. In my picture above it seems like where you see pink insulation there should be lumber? It seems like where the drywall is would be flapping in the breeze so to speak. This may also be why the plate for the deadbolt only has 2 screws, there is nothing for them to screw into. I think this is why /Pine is saying to fir out with a piece of lumber. Thanks for the advice.

I'd think it would depend on how large the rough opening was, there could be a bit of a gap between the door jamb and the framing put in for the doorway. One would want to fill that gap to reduce air flow and heat leaking to the outside. Hard to tell how it was hung, but i've seen some where the door jamb was not centered in the opening and left a largish gap on one side.

 

[TimberFarm]

So my daughters fiancée locked himself out of their house when it was below zero outside when walking the dog. With the title of the thread you can guess what happened. The bottom half of the door frame broke away from the door handle down. The dead bolt wasn’t thrown luckily.

They make repair kits for this made out of metal. That’s what I’m leaning on using. Anybody use one of these? I assume I just need to remove the trim and screw the repair jamb in. We live 4 hours away so I’ll have to haul the needed tools up. I’m open for other methods but my mechanic skills and tools are way ahead of my carpentry skills but I do have some tools.
View attachment 784098

That is not an interior jamb. It is a standard exterior prehung door jamb with the weatherstripping that slips into a groove in the jamb.
The latch plate for the deadbolt is a standard Kwikset Titan model. The extra screw holes are for short screws. They don't do anything really as you will find they line up with the back edge of the sheetrock meeting the wall stud. If you substituted a long screw it would miss or just touch the edge of the sheetrock providing zero extra strength over the short screw supplied with the lockset.

That jamb appears to be 6 9/16" jamb because you can see the groove where it meets the actual 4 9/16" jamb. Also look at the sill extension that gets added on when you go deeper than 4 9/16".

No door jamb is nailed up tight to the studs. That is why door and window openings are referred to as "Rough Openings". Generally your R.O. is 1/2" wider on top and sides to specifically 1) allow room for insulating the gap (Use spray foam!). and 2) there are no framers who will frame an opening perfect. You need room to square the door slab to jambs and that requires finessing the whole prehung door into place.
With all that said, the only real way to truly fix this is to change the whole door. If you don't want to spring for that, the only real way to truly repair this is to pull the whole unit out, remove what is left of that broken jamb, put in a new jamb leg sized as 6 9/19". It needs to be nailed/screwed from the side into the head jamb and into the side of the sill. The rehang the complete prehung door again. You should also run 2 1/2 or 3" screw through one hole of each hinge into the stud behind the jamb. Important if you have heavy glass doors or heavy solid wood doors.

Me: 47 years residential construction; 38 years running my own company; specialized in all residential doors for 28 of those years.

Edit: If this prehung door was made by any major door manufacturer in last 25 years the center to center hole distance between handle and deadbolt is 5 1/2". Industry standard now a days.

 

[dodge man]

I made it to my daughters today. The best route is going to put the broken piece of the jam back in place. It’s in two pieces and I think if I carefully pre drill some holes I can glue it and screw it back in place. There is solid lumber behind the pink insulation and this is an outside pre-hung door.

 

[TimberFarm]

I would plan on replacing that when the weather gets better.

 

[dodge man]

It’s more or less fixed, I still have to replace the interior trim and the latch plate for the door handle. I just glued the original pieces back in and socked some screws in also. I predrilled holes because I was worried about splitting the wood. Also a good tip on the screws on the hinge side. There were a couple of longer ones but most were very short. It will be as strong or stronger than it was. I was going to add screws to the deadbolt plate but it’s metal under them. Anybody know why?

 

[2manyrocks]

The deadbolt plate looks like one that would be used on a metal commercial door frame. As long as the two screws that are in there are long enough to secure the plate to the stud, I wouldn't worry about trying to add two additional screws.

 

[TimberFarm]

You would have to take the deadbolt plate off to see what's under it.
Some Schlage deadbolts came with a sub plate that you install before the finish plate. The sub plate had the long wood screws to go into the stud and then the finish plate was just screwed to the sub plate with little machine screws.