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.

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.

Normally I recommend people that want electronic keypads for their home get the Schlage Encode, either the deadbolt or the lever. Sometimes they get some other lock like a Kwikset or Yale electronic lock because it has better zwave compatibility or something with their alarm and, hey, that is great, happy to install and nobody ever complained about rekeying Kwikset Smartkey deadbolts.

Sometimes people decide to get something really cheap off of Amazon though and it becomes an expensive mistake. The electronics stop working quickly, the bolt is really flimsy, etc. Yesterday I had the extreme displeasure of rekeying two Zomoss electronic deadbolts. It was a wretched experience, let me count the ways:

• The lock doesn’t use standard diameter pins. The pins are about half the diameter of a conventional pin tumbler lock.
• The lock uses a Kwikset KW1 profile but a Kwikset original key won’t work in this lock without modification of the key. Every copy of the key thereafter would also need to be modified and the minutekey machine won’t do that. Neither will the person at True Value.
• The keys that come with this lock have Schlage heads so when you try to copy them at True Value they will copy it onto the wrong blank.
• The plug has lots of large hollow spaces in it so when you try to disassemble the cylinder without knowing this the top pins and springs will get caught. The springs are smaller than standard so locksmiths won’t have replacement springs.
• The lock will stop working a few months or even a few days after you install it, according to online reviews.
• The batteries apparently come loose in the battery compartment causing lockouts

All of this effort is a bit shocking when you look up this model number and realize that it only costs $30, but the time you’ve spent will require charging $60 to rekey it.

So there you have it, the use case for buying this lock is if you have a low security application requiring the lock to work for maybe a few weeks and don’t need the lock rekeyed to match the rest of the house.

If you do want to rekey this lock for some reason bear in mind that you will have to modify a Kwikset key in the way described. In the picture above you have to remove all parts of the key that are visible in the end of the lock. You have to maintain the angle of the tip of the key too. You will want to use the same depths as the current key so that you can reuse the nonstandard pins. When disassembling/reassembling you must turn the key 180 degrees or the top pins and springs will fall into the plug and it will be a bad day for you.

I’ve owned this bench power supply forever so it was only procrastination that kept me from trying this out. The process is pretty easy once you get good contacts and enough steel. If you try this don’t use stainless steel, I have read that chrome will leech out into the solution and then you’re dealing with nastier stuff than just rusty water. Use something that you know is only mild steel.

Once the rust is gone I will try soaking it in kroil, hopefully the rusty spindle will come out of the knob then.

It is rare that I have found anybody willing to buy old locks, even if they are 1000% better than what they have in strength of security. It had never occurred to me to sell somebody a lock that had been actually drilled through though!

People frequently call me when they need a door unlocked, and while I’m driving towards them they decide to call their landlord or check their pockets and realize they don’t need a locksmith after all. Sometimes this is communicated in text, here are some of the most interesting.

Had a customer with a misbehaving Baldwin mortise lock on their houseboat, I told them about Baldwin’s lifetime mechanical warranty and how they could get a replacement for free but they were not the original purchaser of the lock. Rather than buy a replacement for $800-1000, they asked about other options.

These people had a worn out hub so their knob didn’t retract the latch, they could get locked inside or outside. I proposed making sure the Baldwin no longer locked and using a deadbolt above it, using a ballcatch to hold the door shut. You could use a magnet to hold the door shut instead.

The trick was to replace the strike plate (in this case already missing anyway) with a blank plate. Then one can open or shut the door by pulling on the knob. When the door is pulled shut the springloaded ball catch goes into an indent on the doorframe. This was an especially nice solution because the door was a custom made mahogany.

I remember five years ago when somebody told me they had a TSA lock on their luggage to open I would think to myself, “Five minute job.”

It turns out there are hard ones, watch out for T06 TSA locks found on expensive luggage. I had one today manufactured by Abus using a dimple configuration. I think it took me fifteen minutes and some sweat. It made me work for my money! This is a good development, the other TSA locks were way too easy to unlock, even a beginner could have picked them open pretty quickly I think. These dimple pins were giving me false sets and were generally a pain with a hook pick and a standard tension wrench.

Before heaping too much praise on Abus, if they manufactured the combination part of this lock the reason I had to unlock the TSA portion was that it broke. I’ve seen the cheap plastic parts of luggage locks break before which is funny to contrast with the luggage locks made 200 years ago by some Swedish blacksmith I unlocked. That was because the key was locked inside, the lock was still working great after 200 years.

Effective communication is difficult, and it becomes even more difficult when we must describe something we don’t understand. People often call me asking about how much this or that service will cost and I respond asking details about what products I will be interacting with. A good example is whether somebody wants me to unlock their door. The cost depends on how difficult it is to unlock the lock or locks that are on the door. What can you tell me about the locks on your door? If it says Medeco it will likely be more difficult and costly than a lock that says Kwikset or Defiant.

More importantly these details allow me to give the customer an accurate cost breakdown. Contrast this with people who are unable to effectively describe their locks. When asked what kind of locks they want rekeyed, fixed, or replaced some people tell me that the lock is “just a standard lock”. There are many different types of standard locks! Deadbolts, doorknobs, levers, cam locks, etc. That is to say, there is no “standard lock”. We’re no better off finding out what your lock is at this point than when the conversation began!