Category: Blog

  • Cheap Chinese Deadbolts: Problems

    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

    To start with, disassembly: Locksmiths usually turn the plug ninety degrees to disassemble. If that is done, the top pins will get stuck in the plug. Normally the plug would be solid so this wouldn’t happen but to get an electronic deadbolt below $30 corners must be cut somewhere, and zinc alloys aren’t free. They cut slots in this plug to save money on materials.

    Once the plug is pulled out, the locksmith will be shocked to see the smallest diameter lock pins and springs they’ve ever seen. Smaller than Best, probably similar size to National/Compx pins. Don’t dump those pins, if you want to rekey this you will need to reuse these pins in a different configuration!

    Once finished putting the pins in to work with a Kw1 key, the locksmith will reassemble the plug carefully to avoid the pins and springs falling out. Then they will screw the cap on and try the key, at which time they will discover that a Kw1 key will bottom out on the screw cap before being inserted all the way. They will then have to cut the end of the key off at an appropriate angle so that the key can still be inserted but be about 1/8″ shorter, and they will have to trim the bottom of the key off as well.

    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.

  • Electrolytic Rust Removal on Old Lock Parts

    Removing rust with electricity and chemistry

    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.

  • Buy a drilled out lock for only $60!

    There are some screamin’ deals on Offerup this week including this Kwikset thumblatch that somebody drilled out, and it can be yours for only $60!

    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!

  • Canceled Locksmith Requests

    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.

  • Dumb Mistakes

    Sometimes you see something so stupefying you have to just stand there for a little bit and laugh before documenting it for others’ enjoyment. I got called out to rekey this business’s front door because the 24 hour guys they had come out to fix their front door lock didn’t bother to rekey the new lock cylinders to their key, they just handed them new keys and said “Here you go!”

    I assume the same guys left the deadbolt with mounting screws facing the parking lot because they left their sticker above it. That is all kinds of screwy: they left this business less secure than it already was and then thought it would be a good idea to advertise their business above it. I find it mind-boggling.

  • Risk of Death: Stack-On Safes, Consumer Product Safety Commission

    There are plenty of inexpensive safes out there that claim to safely store guns away from children and there are even more videos on Youtube explaining how to easily open these same safes. Anybody remotely interested in opening such safes has been aware for more than a decade that many of these safes are not suitable for safely keeping guns locked up. They do however protect people in places like Seattle and Los Angeles from being liable for crimes committed with their guns if they are stolen: these and other places legally require you to lock your firearms up.

    The CSPC is taking notice of the entry level gunsafe market and has proclaimed that the biometric gun safes made by Stack-On are a risk of death due to the false positives that their biometric keypad may register: apparently the biometric keypad may open if a stranger including a child tries their fingerprint.

    The CSPC recommends destroying the keypad and using a key to unlock the safe.

    I have watched biometric locks proliferate. I hold my breath when installing such locks for customers. I tell them from the get-go that the biometric features may stop working or may not work very exclusively and unlock for people not even registered with the lock, and to definitely not call me expecting any kind of warranty from me if the lock stops working.

    Inexpensive Chinese biometric doorknobs off of Amazon are one thing, but a 200 Ibs biometric safe failing is quite another. The first one can be mailed back to Amazon for a refund or simply thrown away if the customer decides to swallow their mistake and move on. The second will cost a lot of money to send anywhere. You will probably have to pay for a special truck with a lift gate to come pick it up. If you want to get rid of it yourself, you might be in for a surprise: the city dump might not accept safes. Back in the good old days they used to use asbestos for fireproofing material in safes and that can create a cancerous cloud of toxic dust if somebody with a bulldozer crushes a safe full of it. They also used to put tear gas cannisters in safe doors and nobody wants to get exposed to tear gas.

    So it is a bit of a headache getting rid of old safes. (That might be why the magnet fishing channels on Youtube often recover safes near bridges over large rivers) If you are going to get a safe, spend a little extra. You don’t want to take chances on the thing because it is such an investment getting it to your location and then installing it. Many safe installers charge hundreds of dollars to come out and bolt a safe down into concrete floor or attach lag bolts into the floor studs.

    If you really want to get a safe with biometric capabilities, you should probably get a container that will accept an aftermarket safe lock. That way if the biometric features fail you can always replace the lock with one that has more reliable biometric features or go back to an old school dial lock.

  • Worn out old mortise lock? Add a deadbolt and a ball catch or a magnet.

    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.

    After replacing strike with blank plate and a ball catch, electronic deadbolt added above. Baldwin still looks nice and can be used to open and close the door. This also prevents the need for ugly remodeler or wrap plates to retrofit the mortise lock. It would be a huge shame to put a brass wrap plate on this door.
  • The new TSA locks are harder to pick

    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.”

    A new dimple lock made by Abus for TSA, picked

    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.

    Unlocked this awesome Swedish chest. The nails were square head, probably hand forged just like the lock!
  • Lock Terminology, the “Standard Lock”

    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!

  • Install August Electronic Lock on Multipoint Trim

    For years I have told people that electronic locks are not really made for multipoint lock door preps. Only recently have the manufacturers started offering extremely expensive replacements for their multipoint locks that work with keypads and they are thousands of dollars. There are other silly setups like a Burg Wachter euro cylinder that used some kind of radio and a remote keypad I remember installing five years ago. There have also been many dozens who have asked me to replace their multipoint lock with a keypad they bought at the hardware store but only one of them had me go through with installation after I showed him the problems that would result.

    There is another type of electronic lock though, the August deadbolt. It isn’t actually a deadbolt, more of a replacement thumbturn that can be controlled via smartphone. They can be installed to work with American style multipoint locks that have a lazy action tailpiece. It is kind of a hack and you still have to lift up on the handle before locking the august deadbolt but it does work without keys.

    The first step is to acknowledge that you will probably void the multipoint lock warranty by bolting an electronic controller onto it. Maybe you will void the August deadbolt’s warranty too although I can’t see how, none of its parts are altered. The following information is actually only written for the entertainment of a very small population of door hardware nerds and is not actually meant to be a guide, if you do anything described herein it is your full responsibility and I recommend putting on a hazmat suit and two condoms and maybe also a covid mask.

    The second step is to replace the lazy action tailpiece on the lock cylinder with one that is long enough to go through the door and extend past the interior trim plate. The lock I worked on today had a tailpiece that wasn’t long enough. The first tailpiece from an Ilco key in knob cylinder was longer but not long enough. The GMS kik long lazy action tailpiece was perfect.

    Third is to remove the thumbturn from the interior trim plate (because we are planning to use the August deadbolt thumbturn in its place). In most cases these are held on by either a pressed on washer or a snap ring. You can reinstall this later if you decide the electronic lock is a silly idea.

    Fourth step is to reinstall the multipoint trim, put the August mounting plate on the interior trim and line up the tailpiece centered in the mounting plate hole. Now mark the through bolt holes by marking the center of these holes but on the multipoint trim. Now drill and tap the holes. I recommend #8/32tpi screws because the heads are flush after install with the August mounting plate.

    I found that the #8 machine screw fit in the August mounting plate best.

    Now you just screw the August mounting plate on and carry on with the install. It worked great for me. The biggest problem most likely will be trying to explain to people how to lock the door. Using multipoint locks is hard enough for people without the addition of an electronic lock. For many people just the mention of an electronic lock causes their forehead to crease and their eyes to narrow.

    I will say though that for regular users of such a door this will be a huge convenience.