Category: Blog
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When to Replace Your Door Closer
There are two good reasons to replace your door closer if you suspect it is failing. The first and most important is security. If it fails it may not close all the way and the door may not latch and some unwanted person may enter the premises the lock on the door is meant to…
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Fix or Reinforce Your Door Cheaply with a Mag Plate!
Mag plates, or wrap around plates, are useful in numerous situations. Consider the unfortunate soul whose house has been broken into, or at least was attempted. The rapscallions may have used a crowbar or something to attempt to pry the door open or pry the lock off the door, leaving unsightly marks in the wood…
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Key Control: Practical Ideas for Your Property
If you own or manage a property that you must let people use, you are probably familiar with the idea of key control. You must give people keys that they can use but perhaps that they hopefully cannot duplicate. Ideally perhaps these people can only go into the property at certain times. Some people in…
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The Most Secure (and Least Secure) Cars
I like to read technology news and sometimes this news intersects with my work as a locksmith. Today I was reading about research (after reading it appears to only be speculation though) being done by men examining how secure or insecure automobiles’ internal data communications networks are. This may be shocking to some, but your…
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Turn Your Entry Knob Into a Passage Knob
So you have an entry knob and you want to disable it for some reason? Maybe you keep locking yourself out or maybe you don’t want to pay a locksmith to rekey the knob since there is a perfectly good deadbolt just above it. This is the situation I found myself in today. My customer…
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How to Choose a Bicycle Lock
There are lots of different bicycle locks and they all have pros and cons. For most people the choice is between a U lock and a cable lock with a padlock. Last night I went to a celebration of bicycle culture in Seattle called “The Dead Baby Downhill 2014”, a bicycle race and afterparty featuring…
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CX-5 Locks: Higher Security, Low Cost, and I’m a Dealer!
I spent a lot of time researching which “high security” system I would buy into. I did this because the manufacturer often requires that you “buy in” to their system, meaning you might have to spend $15,000 minimum to get the hardware and their confidence. I didn’t want to blow this kind of money on…
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A Strange Old Lock
I got called out for a rekey the other day and came across an interesting specimen, unusual for North Seattle. I don’t know what company manufactured it, just that the keyway was Challenger HO1 (so it was probably Challenger). To rekey it, I had to remove the whole lock off the door, something one need…
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How to Program/Reprogram Your Garage Door Opener
When I rekey a house people often ask me about how to change the garage door opener so that the old residents can’t continue using their remotes to open the garage door. To do this with a modern garage door opener you are doing more than simply changing the frequency like in the old days. …