Locksmithing and Security

One of the most important security devices you probably possess are your hedge clippers.

If your street windows or doors are shielded from view by a tall hedge (or a tall anything else), you are more vulnerable. House-breakers don’t like to be visible to passers-by.

Consider trimming that hedge and consider also PIR (passive infra-red) activated light(s) to illuminate your front porch and windows when someone approaches. House-breakers especially don’t like to be illuminated.

Of course, it’s normally even more secluded at the back of a property, so you might consider PIR-activated lights for the back as well.

You might be thinking, “Ah but there are n houses between me and the street access to our back gardens.” The trouble is that if next door has been broken into, the thieves will often take a look at the backs of adjoining properties to see if there are further easy pickings.

Also good for the back garden are rickety trellis tops on the garden walls. Add roses or thorn bushes for a real deterrent.

We can fit artificial thorns for you as long as your fence or wall tops are reasonably substantial.

At least one block of apartments near here have seemingly been rendered near lethal, apparently by the local authority. Each of the apartments’ front doors has been protected by a steel security gate. That’s good. However, possibly by way of incompetent, time serving officialdom, via Botchit, Cheaply & Run contractors, perhaps mediated by insane tendering regulations, these gates are doomed to fail.

They have made mortice lock boxes much larger than the mortice locks they now contain. They have deployed a cheap lock where only two or three turns of thread of two screws hold the lock together and where they hadn’t heard of, or didn’t want to pay for, thread lock compound.

If the cap comes off a mortice lock in a wooden door, chances are that it won’t go very far as even the very worst of botchers won’t make the mortice hole a great deal bigger than the mortice lock.

When the cap comes off these locks, however, they can wander several millimetres in several directions. Of course the locks weren’t designed to function correctly when in several pieces, so they don’t. So they lock you out. Or lock you in.

If you unfortunately get locked in behind a wooden door, a locksmith or the fire brigade can get you out fairly quickly. If you disastrously get locked in behind a substantial metal gate (they didn’t skimp on the heftiness of the steel) then we hope that the attending fire brigade engine has the “jaws of life” or cutting gear.

And — get this — if you want to check out or remedy this, you can’t. Instead of drilling and tapping a couple of screw holes to secure the lock into the lock box, they’ve welded them in.

So I’m going to put a page up on the web site making a special offer to check out, grind off, make safe and refit with screws any similar gates in my area.

I attended a lost key lockout this morning where the door had two high security locks — unpickable and very expensive to destroy. And there were spare keys waiting inside.

It was a ground floor flat so I asked if there was access to the back door. No. We could try to raise a neighbour but there were high fences with a trellises between the properties. Anyway I’m not up for climbing fences today.

Ah, but the top flat are having an attic room added, the builders are there right now and there’s a ladder all the way (three stories) down to the back yard.

Neighbour and neighbour’s builders were happy for us to troop up and climb down. I wasn’t quite so happy as it was a very long ladder.

The back door was locked with a double euro profile cylinder and the keys were in the inside half of the cylinder and they were turned. So it took two bits of jiggery-pokery before I could start picking the lock. But eventually we were in.

Morals:

• Plan what you’re going to do if you lose keys to a high security lock. Have you got a friend who can hold a copy? Do you have the fitter’s or manufacturer’s telephone numbers?
• Leaving keys turned in the inside half of a double euro profile cylinder makes it more difficult for all but the most gifted locksmith (ahem) or burglar. (Euro profile cylinders are those upside-down exclamation mark shaped cylinders that go right through the door.)
• By contrast, leaving keys on the inside of a mortice lock, turned or not, makes it very easy for the thief. Don’t ever do it.

“And what might Sir be wanting this time?” The sales assistant’s tone held a hint of sarcasm. I had already been to the counter of a Shepher’s Bush hire shop twice. The first time was to get ear defenders. The second time was to get a breathing mask.

I had been asked to open a vault door that had stayed undisturbed for at least twenty years. This was in the basement of a disused bank building that had been sold once to the usual trade of the area — the rag trade — and was about to be sold again. The upcoming owners wanted full use of the basement but there were these two vaults to be removed. The vault that the late, but probably unlamented, bank had actually been using was already open. Praise be for that. It was a Tann vault door a foot thick with two very serious combination locks, thermal and mechanical relockers, glass, … Something I wouldn’t want to tangle with.

The other vault was much more modest but much more interesting. Because it had a very old Hobbs lock on it and I wanted a Hobbs lock for my practice/collection shelf. I’d already checked with the agent that I could take any “scrap” I wanted.

First of all I’d had a good look around. Inside the scary Tann vault were two regular safes. (By now shoulder-high monstrous safes seemed regular.) And inside one of the safes was a drawer which when picked open contained around 130 keys. Some were labelled; some were not. One of them had looked like a Hobbs key — hooray. But it hadn’t opened the old vault — boo. The key had fitted but nothing inside would budge. I’d sent in clouds of Plusgas penetrating spray with no success. I’d gone away, come back and sprayed WD40, and gone away again. Nothing. Still hadn’t budged.

All this was in an unlit basement that had been deserted for a couple of years. Just me and my portable lamp. I really didn’t want to put a hole in the lock so I had put a little hole in the door and looked inside with a borescope. I could see that one common trick with very old vault doors wasn’t going to work. The boltwork inside the door was pretty robust stuff; it had none of the give that the trick relies on.

So I had decided to make two cuts right through the door and into the main bolt bar thereby removing a crucial section of it, and allowing the handle to move the boltwork despite the lock’s bolt still being engaged in the main bolt bar. (A safe lock has a bolt but that’s not what secures the safe door. The lock’s bolt simply stops the safe’s main bolt work — five 3-inch iron bolts in this case — from moving.)

After two minutes of cutting, I was hearing loud ringing noises. All the walls of the basement were bare and echoing madly. My poor ears. I had brought no ear defenders. (Silly.) But there was a hire shop three doors down the street. So I’d gone and bought some ear defenders.

After another two minutes of cutting I had tasted iron. “This is quite a small cellar; and there’s no air moving”, I thought. “Pretty silly of me not to have brought a mask”. At least the goggles were where they should have been in the van, and were already perched on my nose. Back to the hire shop.

Now I could smell burning. But not burning iron. This door was of giant-sparkler-grade iron. The spark shower was unusually impressive. The sparks were bouncing off the low ceiling and onto what little hair I have remaining.

“Do you have any hats”, I was sheepishly asking the hire shop assistant on my third visit. They didn’t. I remembered being shown how to make a “printer’s pie” at some point in another career. People operating printing presses would make protective hats out of newsprint. So I made myself a hat from that day’s Independent. It must have looked quite a sight. I think I was probably cackling madly by this point.

Well, I got my lock. Undamaged. And, by the time it was finally out of the opened door, the key — yes, it was the right one — had decided to eventually start working.

Hands up all those who remember when the full name of WD-40 was Rocket WD-40.

WD-40 is a water-displacement spray. It was the 40th attempt at a formulation to displace water from rockets awaiting launch, and thus prevent pools of standing water and hinder corrosion. It was developed in 1953 by Norm Larsen for the San Diego Rocket Company.

It’s primary constituent is a heavy, sticky, viscous oil. To help WD-40 get to where it’s needed this oil is diluted with lighter hydrocarbons which quickly evapourate.

The point is that WD-40 is excellent for displacing water and keeping it displaced and it’s excellent at penetrating. What it’s not good at is lubricating.

If you have a lock that not working smoothly, do not use WD-40. You are effectively squirting glue in there. And you are washing away any grease that the manufacturer put in there (although well-designed and well-made locks, like Chubbs, for example, don’t need lubricant.)  Use a silicone spray or a teflon (PTFE) spray, or better still some graphite. If you can’t find graphite but you can find a soft (2B, 3B) pencil, scrape some graphite off that. Graphite is slippery because its carbon atoms are in flat sheets that slide over each other. And it will remain slippery forever for all practical purposes.

What is a dropped snib? Is it one of the many ailments that torment us over-fifties?

Snib or holdback are the correct terms for the part of a lock that stops a door latching behind you as you pop out to the dustbin in your dressing gown. It’s often incorrectly called the latch; latch, however, is what a door is doing if it locks as it closes, without your having to take any action other than close the door.

On locks that don’t have much sophistication, as well as holding the latchbolt open, the snib can also lock the latchbolt closed even against the correct key.

A dropped snib is when the snib gets loose, and when the lock is fitted to the unlucky side of the door, and when as you slam the door and it latches shut, the snib falls down and locks you out.

So, which way would your snib be going if it fell downwards? Would it be falling towards inactive? Nice green tick! Or falling towards active? Nasty red cross! If, for example, you had a Yale rimlatch lock on the right-hand side of your door (looking at the door from the outside), then I’m afraid it doesn’t fail safe, it fails the vexatious way.

If you have a simple latch lock and it’s on troublesome side of the door, keep an eye out for the snib getting loose and floppy.

If you like finding things to worry about, I have one more for you. Is there a big gap between the door and the frame? It has been known for a latch lock to be snibbed to the locked state while the door is actually open, and then for the door to slam shut. The gap is big enough that the bevelled latch bolt can enter the bolthole, but it can’t then be got out again.

Even one of the locksmith bulletin boards I’m on can’t get this one right!

A rim lock is one that is fixed to the inside face of the door. (Although it would not surprise me if one of the national call centres’ operatives, whose work I was tidying up after yesterday, had fitted a rimlock to the outside face of a door! Remember: the nationals are good at advertising and staffing call centres in a “cost effective way”; they are not good at locksmithing, plumbing, carpentry, …)

The alternative to a rim lock is a mortice lock. This is one that has been fitted into a chiseled-out hole (the mortice) in the door. As long as the door’s thickness is 44 mm or more, a mortice lock is usually more secure.

A different kind of classification (and this is where even my trade association’s bulletin board gets it wrong), is the way in which the lock works: most often the tumblers are either pins or they are levers. And normally pin tumblers are fiddly and small enough that they are encased in a, usually removable, cylinder. So pin tumbler locks can usually also be called cylinder locks.

The most common pin tumbler cylinder lock on wooden doors in the UK is the five-pin Yale. The most common mortice lock in London is the Chubb 114, which is a five-lever mortice lock.

Often, but definitely not always, a pin tumbler/cylinder lock is a rimlock and a lever lock is a mortice lock.

Well, if you care, hopefully that’s been of help.

Oh. Back, briefly, to the nationals. They are the ones with the huge adverts in the phone books where there are no local phone numbers visible. Naturally, I am going to say that 90% of the time, you’d be better off with a local tradesman (I wish I could say 99%, but there we are; I’d also like a Goldwing for Christmas). And if you are a local tradesman who’s kindly offered an 0800 or 0845 number, my advice would be to show your landline number as well, so that people can have confidence that you are local.

If your safe is beeping at you, it’s probably trying to tell you that its battery is failing. Please minister to its needs and replace the battery. Especially if some genius designer has put the batteries inside the safe. And if you can’t face changing the batteries please do just pop and check that the override key and the instructions aren’t locked inside the safe.

Are you the kind of person who likes to be prepared and who doesn’t like surprises and emergencies? Then you might like to check what locks are fitted to your front door. And if it turns out to be exotic or high security, you might want to recall or discover who fitted it or manufactured it. Then if, heaven forbid, you find you’ve been locked out one day — actually it’s never day it’s always night and a cold, wet and windy one at that — you’ll have a start on who might be able to get you back inside again. You might also want to ensure that a trusted friend who never takes holidays has a spare key.

If you have a Chubb, Yale, Union, ERA, Legge, Securefast, Walsall, Willenhall or Imperial, for example, then you have a regular lock. If you have a Banham, a MulTlock, a Gerda, a Bramah, for example, then you have a high-security or exotic lock. (If you have a Bramah lock you are in good and ancient company. Mr Pickwick had a Bramah.)

The local authority here has been fitting front doors with an imported lock system that would do the front door of a desirable castle proud: a lock that’s completely unique driving huge medieval bolts. However, lock yourself out and try calling said local authority and you will be told to call a locksmith. Call a locksmith and you will be told that they have no idea how to get you in.

If you have a local authority front door with a completely circular keyhole right in the middle of the door and some impressive boltwork on the inside, contact your local authority and get a definitive answer on how you a) get a spare key, and b) gain entry should you ever find yourself locked out.

If you’re not sure, and you’re living in the UK, leave a comment and I’ll venture an opinion on your lock’s surprise-quotient.

I had to open a safe in a library the other day. It wasn’t in some backroom, it was out in the main reading area. It was a simple little thing with little residual value and they’d already ordered a replacement, so drilling it open rather than picking it open was a cheaper option for them. Every time I fired up the drill, though, two or three people would look up from their book and over toward my direction. No-one actually went, “Ssshhh”, however. Pity really; I couldn’t help feeling that they didn’t know their parts properly.

It was nice to be in a large, well-lit room, though. Although I started working on safes thinking that I’d be more comfortable than when kneeling on a doorstep in a wet and windy doorway — inside, warm, dry, nice carpet to kneel on — it turns out that most safes are crammed into the tiniest, badly lit, uncomfortable corner of the grottiest uncarpeted storeroom you can imagine. The oddest location was a safe that was in the staff toilet. It was quite a tall safe so I actually had somewhere to sit [sic] for once.