Recently I was called out to an apartment building because a tenant noticed that when he accidentally put his building key in his unit door lock it inexplicably opened! There are many possible reasons for this. Most are because of poor choices by poor locksmiths.

This time it turned out to be because some locksmith went to the trouble of replacing all of the top pins in this unit’s two lock cylinders with bottom pins. This makes it so that miscut keys will work effortlessly in the lock. Unfortunately it also means that other keys will also work. Probably many other unit keys in the building would work in such a lock cylinder.

The building key doesn’t lift the first three pins anywhere near high enough to operate this lock…. unless somebody made it less secure by replacing top pins with bottom pins.

I fixed the lock cylinders with factory specified pins and realized why the other locksmith did their hack substitution: the master key was miscut. The spacing and depths were slightly off. The key had to be pulled out slightly to work correctly with standard top pins. To fix this problem I code cut the manager a new master key.

The manager of this building must have employed the same locksmith for her other buildings because they all have similar problems. Old miscut or worn out master keys and hack locksmiths filing the cylinder plug down to allow for all sorts of different keys to work or for master pins to get stuck in the cylinder. My solution is always to make sure that the manager has a code cut key. Sometimes I replace the cylinder. I will explain the reasons for this to the manager until I’m blue in the face. In the past this has cost me customers because copies of worn old keys don’t work.

I refuse to slop up a lock cylinder in these ways so that people’s ratty old keys will work the way they used to with the old locksmith who was leaving them insecure. At least not without getting it in writing that they want me to do something like this and take responsibility for it. This costs me callbacks sometimes because people don’t understand that keys aren’t exactly the same and a key some bored guy at the hardware store made isn’t necessarily an exact copy of the key.