Locksmithing and Security

Does your door lock employ two or three cylindrical bolts and maybe another pair of bolts top and bottom? Do you wind these bolts out and wind them back in again?

You may have a Mul-T-Lock door. If you look around the handle fittings you’ll usually find the name there.

The good news is that if you do have such a door, you have a very good door and lock system—pretty strong and secure. Your letterbox, for example, is probably a long way from the lock and is protected by a nice strong cowl.

Around here, most of these doors are on properties that were once owned by the local authority.

The “bad” news is that changing the cylinder is a little more expensive. This winding business is done via the cylinder (a euro- or “pear”- shaped cylinder) having a cog-wheel to do the work. (A regular euro cylinder has a cam that “flips” the lock rather than winds it.) These unusual cog cylinders are nearly three times the cost of a regular cylinder.

The other thing, and the main reason for the post, is to note that, apart from the cylinder, the door and lock are an integral system. If you’re buying a place with a Mul-T-Lock door, try to obtain from the sellers, especially if it is the local authority, details of who can repair/replace the door. I can’t you see.

When I built the workshop at the bottom of the garden (OK, it’s a shed), I’m glad to say I went a bit over-the-top insulating it. I was going to line the walls with pegboard so I put polystyrene foam and aluminium foil behind the pegboard. By the way, holes are darned expensive: pegboard is more than three times the price of plain hardboard. I couldn’t see any way of doing the same kind of thing for the roof, so I gritted my teeth and stumped up the money for the proper thing—foil-coated polyfoam.

The trouble is I should never have let the cat watch Pinocchio. When I’m working down there, he fancies coming in and helping. Once he’s in, however, and sees the reality of filing things, he quickly gets bored and wants to go out. Then, only having a slightly better memory than a goldfish, he wants to come in again. And so it goes; along with my nice warm air.

I thought I’d heard of most scams. But here’s one from the FSB (Federation of Small Businesses) scamwatch pages that I hadn’t heard of.

You get into your car in a car park and start it up. You reverse out of your space and see a note stuck to the rear window. You get out to retrieve the notice, the scumbags then jump into your car—engine running and unlocked—and off they go.

So if you’ve just got into your car and are moving off, don’t be persuaded to stop and investigate any little peculiarities. Wait until you’re a good distance away before you investigate. If you must stop just after you’ve moved off, be very careful. Have a good look around from the inside with the doors locked first. If you must get out, try to wait until a family is in the vicinity and then switch off the engine, take your keys and take your purse.

I had already heard of another much scarier scam. You start to reverse, there’s a scream, you stop and leap out only to find someone under the rear of your car. But you didn’t hit them. They were hiding; they screamed first and then slid into place after you stopped.

We have just decided that we are no longer accepting jobs from a certain area of Putney in south-west London. There are so many barriers and “no entry”s, that unless you have a specialist map you cannot get to a significant proportion of the residents. And, of course, your customer is necessarily always going to be included in that percentage. And of course that map isn’t available to tradespeople.

I have a brother-in-law who is a topologist—I really do—and he agrees that there are certain streets that you cannot reach, and one street where if you do manage to get to it, you can never leave again. (Topology is the branch of mathematics which says a teacup is the same as a doughnut, which can prove the hairy ball theorem—that you can’t comb down the hairs of a hairy ball without creating a cowlick—and which probably started with the proof, long ago, that there was no promenade that would take a walker over each and every one of the seven bridges of Königsberg just once.)