Category: Blog
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Repairing a Door Frame, Emergency
Got called out to fix a kicked-in door downtown. It was a wild night with Pres. Biden visiting town, an escaped zebra running around in the mountains and the base level anarchy that occurs in downtown Seattle on any given day. It was no surprise that a Belltown apartment building’s door got kicked in. The…
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Armor Concepts’ Door Armor: A Review
I don’t want to sound like a shill but let’s get this out of the way first: I think the “Jamb Protector” these folks make is probably the best security improvement most people can make if they already have a decent deadbolt and they install it properly. I have been installing these for years, before…
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Landlord Tenant Laws and Do Not Duplicate Keys
Update: as expected I confirmed that this is hogwash, landlords are not required to use a restricted keyway for rentals. There is nothing in the Washington State RCW’s that mention this requirement. Here is The Residential Landlord Tenant Act. Today somebody called me asking about restricted keyways for his rental unit. I warned him that…
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Where to get antique-y woodscrews
You’re here because you have a pretty nice old antique lock, but successive visits by helpful tradesmen or well-meaning husbands clearing a docket of tasks as beer thirty approaches have filled the holes on your lock’s trim with a motley selection of steel screws, lag bolts, nails, etc. These look like so many small and…
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The blessing of IC cores
Sometimes I get called out to rekey a commercial building (less frequently it’s a restaurant, apartment building or house) that has special locks using SFIC cores. They look like little figure eight lock cylinders and sometimes they say BEST, Arrow, or Falcon on them just above where you stick your key. The customer usually looks…
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How safe are safes?
It isn’t often that news about safes and safe locks hits the mainstream. Recently it came out that Liberty Safe had provided a factory code to the FBI to open up a gun safe owned by one of the accused in the January 6th imbroglio.; not with a court order but with a search warrant.…
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Safes should just work
I got called out to fix a safe last week. Normally this wouldn’t be newsworthy but this time it was because I was the second safe technician to show up that day. The first one told the customer that they must continue hitting the safe door with a hammer to close it or get it…
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New developments in locks and technology
There has been proof of concept attacks to take control of vehicles by getting access to the can bus but this is an interesting sign that the criminal underworld has begun distributing a tool for stealing cars in a way that bypasses the ECU and immobilizer by directly accessing the car’s local network, as it…
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Sometimes doors sag because of negligence
There are many reasons for doors not shutting correctly. Loose hinges, frames not connected to anything, pivot hinges wearing out. Today I encountered one that was heretofore alien to me: negligent installation. There were maybe 30 holes on this continuous hinge and the people who installed it only tapped and installed about six or seven…