People call me every day to rekey their house for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there are legal issues or concerns for one’s safety and people just want their locks changed regardless of cost. I don’t mind coming out to rekey your smartkey locks but I feel bad charging for it since it is usually really easy to do. I charge half the usual rekey rate to rekey smartkey locks unless there is no working key.

If you want to save $100 or more you should try doing it yourself. Assuming the lock is in good working condition all you need is a smartkey tool or even a sim card tool and a new kwikset (or Baldwin Smartkey) key and you can follow the instructions in the following video:

They don’t always work. Smartkey technology is brilliant and a modern marvel but… There are a lot of reasons kwikset smartkey locks fail:

• The key must be cut close to manufacturer standards. Kwikset keys that work with smartkey must be cut at five specific places on the key to one of six specific depths at those places. If the key isn’t cut like this it can cause the lock to malfunction permanently. I believe this happens when turning an improperly cut key in the lock which bends the little metal guide pins or the serrations in the wafers they are supposed to mate with.

• The smartkey cylinders have very delicate workings as seen above. If they are exposed to rainwater for several years or people try to lubricate them with WD-40 alternating with graphite they will not rekey properly.
• The KW1 keyway is looser than a lot of other keyways which makes them a PITA to masterkey. It also means that the key can be put in at an angle instead of straight. If you rekey one of these locks make sure that the key is not on a heavy keyring pulling the head of the key down. To unlock the door you would then have to pull the key down while turning it.
• Trying to rekey these to a Kwikset key that isn’t cut to Kwikset spec. There are a lot of manufacturers that use the Kw1 keyway but use different spacing and depths. They won’t work well if at all. EZSet uses Weiser depths instead of Kwikset depths. Don’t try to rekey these to any key that isn’t Kwikset. I would recommend only using keys that actually say Kwikset on them to be sure. Then you can make copies from that key.

If you mess something up you can call Kwikset or Baldwin tech support, they will probably warranty your lock depending on how old it is. If they won’t, you have choices. You can replace the Smartkey cylinder with a new one. Kwikset finally started selling Smartkey cylinders compatible with Schlage C keyway locks so you can finally consolidate your keys without replacing the entire lock. There are numerous form factors for their handlesets but the deadbolt cylinders seem to be standardised.

If you want me to fix it for you I’m happy to do so. You can bring the lock to me by appointment or you can pay me a service call to come to your location and fix or replace your cylinder on the spot.

This whole post is pretty diy but if you are interested in how to rekey one of these cylinders without a working key then either buy a rekey cradle or a “better resetter” or watch the following video. I have never invested in a Kwikset Smartkey rekey cradle. I have a better resetter tool but it fell behind some stuff in my van a year ago so this is how I reset smartkey lock cylinders now:

There are lots of things that can go wrong doing this and I refuse to accept any responsibility for what happens if you decide to do this. It probably voids your warranty, do it at your own risk. Do it over a surface in case you drop springs or little bits so you can find them again.

The only thing you really need is a screwdriver or other object to remove the c clip and a shim and a key you want to work in the cylinder. Search google for how to get a shim from a dvd package or something.

Next remove the c clip.

Put the key in. (You may be able to skip the next step depending on the cuts of your key.) This moves some little bits out of the way for your shim, slide the shim in between the housing and the little bits that moved out of the way.

When the shim is pushed all the way in there pull the plug out along with your key, it slides out very easily because of some ball bearings. Don’t let those fall out or if they do keep them to put back in later.

Now remove the two halves of the plug as seen in the video. The five sliding objects have to be lined up as in the video. Recombine the two halves and ensure that the smaller half slides back and forth. That means it worked. Now put it back together again and put it in the door.

If it malfunctioned before don’t trust it, it might malfunction again. You can remove malfunctioning sliders and replace them.

When people ask me to rekey their locks I like to ask them to walk through the house and show the locks to me. I try the locks out to see if there are any blatant issues with them because sometimes you change the key for a lock and the customer gets upset that some problem wasn’t fixed in the course of changing the key. In most cases locks won’t magically get better after changing the key, unless the key or the pins were the problem.

Typical lock problems include strike misalignments or even locks that aren’t installed correctly or worn out parts like old schlage b160 bolts not retracting. If it is easy to fix the installation by repositioning the lock after rekeying it I will do so but if it isn’t I expect to be paid to fix other problems.

An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed more and more recently is people expecting their locks to defy the laws of physics after I work on them. Recently one gentleman was disappointed that he had to push the door closed to latch it. He would touch it with his finger as lightly as possible and look at me as though I had broken his lock in the course of rekeying it when it didn’t latch. I had to explain to him that there is a spring in the latch and to get the door to shut one has to exert enough force to overcome that of the spring in the springlatch to shut the door.

The interesting thing about this is that the lock was the exact same one an hour before, the guy was just paying more attention to the lock after I had worked on it and expected some kind of behaviour from the lock that wasn’t possible.

Another job I did last week involved warranty parts replacement for a Baldwin deadbolt, the thumbturn’s crush washer needed replacement. A few days later the customer called and complained of “crunchy” feeling in the deadbolt. I never took the deadbolt off the door, the cylinder wasn’t ever repositioned, I just installed a thumbturn. The customer had just been paying more attention to the lock after I worked on it. I watched her fiddle with her key for ten minutes trying to reproduce the crunchy behaviour before informing her that I had other appointments that day. She angrily slammed the door. Not sure what she wanted from me.

While relating this story to my locksmith friends one of them had an even better story, he rekeyed this lady’s house and after he was done, she seemed unable to even use her own locks. She was physically unable to lock her deadbolt with her hand. He demonstrated using two fingers how to lock her deadbolt and watched, flabbergasted, as the customer either feigned ignorance or magically forgot how to use the lock. In a fit of frustration, he left without payment. I told him that I suspect that had been the idea all along. He has 20 years of experience and I know that he left the lock in equal or better shape that he found it in.

Some customers just suck. It’s too bad that there aren’t Yelp reviews for businesses to leave for customers. When I encounter behaviour such as described, I let my locksmith friends know. We put these addresses and phone numbers into our phones to avoid these stressful situations. /rant

If you lost the keys to your car you want to ask people to originate a key for your car or just make a key for your car. Don’t ask them to come unlock your car. You don’t need your car unlocked, you need a key for your car. Asking people to unlock your car just wastes everybody’s time, the people coming out to unlock your car and yours.

I don’t take any responsibility for anything that might happen or who might be maimed as a result of your interpretation of these directions which are clearly provided for entertainment only.

Ultraloq deadbolts are starting to become more popular in the residential electronic deadbolt market. They are even being carried at Home Depot. I guess that means they are at least as good as the Defiant brand electronic deadbolt. Not exactly a high bar but back to Ultraloq…

If you want to know it installs pretty easily and seems to work fine for the brief amount of time between me installing it and getting paid and leaving. At this point I’ve only installed a few that didn’t work correctly out of the box for customers (I don’t stock, sell or warranty them). If you have a modern tubular deadbolt that works without pushing or pulling on the door it will probably not be too hard for you to install one of these in its place.

The model I’ve seen comes with a key override and to the untrained eye it uses a schlage key. That’s because the manufacturer bucked convention and used a kwikset key with a schlage head on it. That’s a tad obnoxious, it is going to cause a lot of head scratching all over the world when people ask why their keys that look exactly the same can’t be made to work in their new lock. It would be like labeling shoes as sized for men when they are really size 10 women’s.

Many people won’t care and will put the keys that come with it in their desk drawer to be slowly shoved to the back with all of their dried up pens and other assorted flotsam, but for those of you who want or even demand their schlage key work in their new deadbolt, I have the answer for you because I have done it and after a weeklong vacation in AZ I felt unhurried enough to document how to do this for you. Read on, all three of you!

Obviously this lock cylinder will only work with kw1 keys so we’re going to have to replace the cylinder with one that is SC1 compatible. Wait! Before you reach for your 5 gallon bucket of SC1 cylinders, know that the manufacturer made their cylinder a smaller size than regular 99 type or “universal” kik cylinders. You can’t use a normal cylinder without reaming the space for the cylinder out to a larger size. You CAN use an Emtek cylinder or any cylinder made to work in an Emtek deadbolt though as long as it isn’t longer than the original meaning it must be a five pin.

Those malcontents at Emtek are the only large manufacturer to use these smaller stupid cylinders but I’ve done a good business selling better cylinders made by CX5 to fit in them, Medeco also makes cylinders that will work. As a result I have a few Emtek cylinders that will work for this.

The Emtek cylinder slides right in! If you have a tailpiece for an Emtek deadbolt, you’re golden, you can just put the whole thing back together and plug in the batteries and forget all about the nasty details of tailpieces and keyways and other outtakes of my daily struggles.

I usually reuse the tailpiece on the new cylinder when I replace them so I don’t have Emtek tailpieces. The blockheads at Ultraloq copied the format of the Emtek cylinder but decided to move the hole for the spring loaded cap pin 180 degrees to the bottom of the cylinder for some reason which means the timing is off for their weird tailpiece. It will not fit through the deadbolt because of a nubbin they added on.

So, you’ll have to cut that nubbin off. I ground it off with my angle grinder, took ten seconds. If you have a bench grinder that would work well too. I suppose you could just file it off. Once the protuberance of delight has been removed from the tailpiece you can reassemble the deadbolt. First some little screws hold on a sort of stop to keep the cylinder from being pushed back. Then a black plastic thing slides over all of it and is also held in place with an exceedingly small screw. I hope after all of that you remembered to rekey the Emtek cylinder to the SC1 key!

The point of the stupid protuberance on the tailpiece is to make sure idiots like us don’t try to put the tailpiece through the bolt in the wrong orientation. That would confuse the deadbolt, it would think it was locked when it was unlocked or maybe that the moon landing was faked. Now that we ground that protuberance off, the deadbolt is no longer idiot-proof. You have to put the tailpiece through the bolt horizontally when the bolt is in a retracted state, though at this point the tailpiece is upside down and it should still be horizontal when the bolt is not out.

Update: I found replacement screws for screwing in the bracket that holds the cylinder i place. The ones included won’t work with a 6 pin cylinder so you can either grind the back off the bible or you can replace the screws with m2.5 screws.

At this point just follow the rest of the instructions and enjoy using your normal house key on your new electronic deadbolt against all efforts employed by Ultraloq.

Today I noticed that Gov. Inslee is bringing an end to the eviction moratorium in WA. After two years of not receiving compensation of any kind from tenants or the state, property owners will now have recourse to legally remove nonpaying tenants. Not so fast though! The Governor surely doesn’t want to be remembered for doubling the number of homeless people overnight and has mandated additional rules before an eviction may occur. From The Seattle Times:

State law now requires landlords to offer tenants repayment plans and to notify a local dispute resolution center when they begin the early steps of the eviction process, allowing for possible mediation before a tenant loses their housing. For landlords following that process, state law requires certain waiting periods, such as allowing a tenant 14 days to respond to a payment plan.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/inslee-says-he-will-let-statewide-eviction-limits-expire-sunday/

So evictions are not greenlit yet. The city of Seattle has its own eviction moratorium that won’t expire until 2022. For other areas there are extra steps to go through. First there is a mediation process. Once that has been completed, then the police have to post notice. I can’t change the locks until the possessions of the tenant are all gone or the police tell me that it’s okay to change the locks. The legalities of eviction right now are as certain as the shifting sands. New free legal services are being offered to tenants so the best advice for property rental owners is probably to lawyer up.

I’m starting to get some calls asking about locking out nonpaying tenants. I’m not going to do it without getting the legal green light from the police. This presents its own hurdle since the police force is already spread very thinly in Seattle and what remains of the SPD is probably engaged in higher priority work than evictions.

Locksmiths love it when people call them up, describing a myriad of issues with their locks as being caused by stickiness. I’ve never once found that one of these locks felt sticky to the touch. It would be a strange situation outside of maybe a maple syrup production facility or maybe an apiary or meadery.

Instead when people describe their locks as sticky they mean that it is difficult to turn a key which is miscut or a copy of a copy of a copy, or they may mean that it is difficult to throw the deadbolt because the strike plate isn’t in the right spot or the door is sagging.

I can’t fault people for not having the terminology to describe their problems. If they did then they’d just look up how to fix their problem on the internet. Still, I feel like I know how doctors feel with their patients throwing around medical terminology they saw on reddit or youtube or somewhere. Not that I am conflating locksmithing with the lofty ideals of Medicine; nobody ever made me recite an oath to be a locksmith, though maybe that ought to be a requirement.

Earlier this week the problem of throwing around misunderstood terminology cost one of my customers $150. She asked me to come out and rekey a door. To me, this means I should make a new key work in that door. She didn’t elaborate and I rekeyed the door to a new key. The original pins were casually tossed in my brass recycling box.

A few days later the woman called and demanded to know why the key provided didn’t work in the other doors it was supposed to! To her, to rekey meant that I should recreate the original key that worked in that door. I explained what rekeying was as locksmiths understood it and what recreating a key was and the difference between them and she paid me to come back out and regenerate the key from a different door and I rekeyed the first lock back to the originated key it used to work with. It all would have been cheaper and easier if this customer had told me in plain English exactly what it was that she wanted but I have certainly annoyed some other professional by casually tossing their professional lingo about.

Many times people call me up asking to rekey their vehicle because they lost their key but in this situation I know that they are probably confused about what they want and after learning what rekeying is they invariably say that they want their lost keys replaced rather than having their vehicle rekeyed. It is possible to rekey a vehicle and even a good idea if you lost your key near where you park your vehicle but it is very expensive because it’s often difficult to get the lock cylinders out, especially with older cars that have brittle plastic linkages connecting the lock cylinders to the locks themselves. These pieces of plastic snap easily! Many older American vehicles require that you remove the entire steering column to disassemble the ignition!