Lavishing attention on locker latches

Stu Davies tracks down a helpful dealer and a cost effective way to get locker latch spares

On our late 1990s Beneteau we have lovely cherry wood veneers with basket work doored lockers. The latches on them are extremely simple and consist of a finger hole in the door with a plastic swinging latch which catches on a dowel in the door jamb.

The latch is spring loaded: push it through the hole and it disengages from the dowl and the door swings open. Simple but effective.

The weak spot on them is the spring – eventually they break and then the door can swing open at will.

Getting Beneteau parts can be an expensive business. The UK dealerships will order the parts for you, but delivery from France is via courier and for small items such as this is uneconomical.

I have had a couple of these latch springs break in the ten years I’ve owned the boat and have successfully repaired them by utilising a clothes peg spring! But this is a one off: the plastic bits of the original latches have to be cut to dismantle them and once a repair has been done, that is it. If it goes again it’s scrap.

A few months ago the one behind the sink went again so I rang a few Beneteau dealers to see if anyone could order the parts without incurring the huge courier cost. Fox’s Yacht Sales in Ipswich (foxsyachts. co.uk) were not only immensely knowledgeable about the spares, but also went out of their way to arrange for my order to be 'piggybacked’ on to an existing bigger order. The only downside was a wait of a week or so for that order to process, but that was fine.

It cost a few pounds for postage and packaging from Ipswich to North Wales and fitting it was just a case of transferring the decorative wooden laminate from the old one, and screwing the latch on, while checking that it was latching OK on the dowel.

Thank you Fox's.

This door latch has been repaired once using a clothes peg spring but now needs replacing

First remove the old latch – simply a job of unscrewing it from the back of the locker door

To remove the veneer from the old latch, apply gentle heat to melt the glue and prise off

It’s then just a case of aligning grain and pressing the veneer into the face of the new latch

Typical door finger latch showing veneer on the face of the finger push