Locksmithing and Security

It’s time to mention locks as fire hazards again.

When considering the locks on your doors, you need to strike a balance between security and safety. You want to keep thieves and other scum out, but you don’t want to keep yourself in should a fire break out. (There must be other internal hazards you might be in a hurry to escape from, but fire is the main one.)

If you deadlock your front door whilst you’re in, you run the risk of not having your key on you when you reach the front door with flames behind you. (Deadlocking means “you locked it, you unlock it”; it’s the opposite of a sprung or “live” lock.)

It’s obviously not a good idea to keep the key in the lock, even if there’s no letter-slot. “Yes but I always leave the key on the hall table.” Again that’s a security risk if you have a letter-slot; and Sod’s Law says that it won’t be there the day of an emergency — someone couldn’t be bothered to find their key when they left that morning so they took the spare.

If you must deadlock your front door when you’re inside, get a break-glass box with a spare key inside, near the front door (but not reachable via the letter-slot).

The best option is the simplest: traditional bolts. Don’t get titchy little ones, with titchy little screws. Get some thumping big ones with decent sized screws, especially the screws in the staple (the part that holds the bolt when it’s been thrown).

Over the next few years, and thanks mostly to the internet (not criticising; I think the internet is one of the modern wonders), locks will be becoming unpickable. So even your best, friendly, local locksmith won’t be able to get you in non-destructively should you lock yourself out. So you’ll need to leave keys with a trusted friend who’s nearby but not next door.

Imagine you’ve broken into a house and you’re one of the top 10% of thieves, intelligence-wise, i.e. you’re IQ has just struggled over 50. You find a set of keys. It doesn’t matter if, sensibly, there’s no label. You’re going to try …

So, don’t leave keys with next door neighbours. Leave them with someone close but not that close.

(Anyone remember a film portraying Buster Edwards as a, mostly, lovable thief? I hated that film. Thieves blight lives. End of story.)

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.

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.

I’m getting a call a day from the same bunch of cold callers. They are the Locksmith Register. They were pests when they were on their own. Now they’re part of BT Customerstreet, which is part of BT Directories. BT Directories bought a whole bunch of pests via their acquisition of web “services” companies such as Ufindus and the original Customerstreet.

If you’re a tradesperson in the UK you may well have received a nuisance call from the same bunch. I’m sure they pester plumbers, decorators, etc. just as badly. They open with “I’m calling from BT and I’m looking for a locksmith/plumber/whatever.” Of course they’re not. They’re looking to sell you website building or “optimization”. And if you take only a short look at the results of a google search on BT Customerstreet, you’ll struggle to find any happy customers; the only positive stuff you will find is BT Customerstreet’s own copious blogs which seem to be trying to crowd the complaint blogs and sites off the front few pages of google searches.

The other very annoying thing is their ignoring of the Telephone Preference Service or TPS. If you haven’t signed up with TPS, you might consider it. It does actually reduce the number of nuisance calls and cold calls that you get. A surprising number–the majority in fact–of telephone marketing and sales companies respect the TPS. But not BT Customerstreet.

Being BT they claim, with near certainty of being half right, that you are already a customer and therefore not covered by the TPS.

Anyway the good news is that the Office of Fair Trading have received several complaints. MPs have received complaints. Trades organisations have received complaints. So maybe something will happen to curb this unpleasant bunch.

Imagine, heaven forbid, a bent postal worker, e.g. working in your local sorting office, who sees an envelope with an address on it (surprise, surprise) and can see or feel a key inside. Pretty tempting eh? You might also want to check out this Channel 4 programme

If you’re sending keys through the post, you must disguise their outline. We always cut around the key into some corrugated cardboard and tape the key in the hole, and we obscure the key’s keyring hole. And we then wrap that in paper and tissue paper.

You’re probably lucky if you make the even more basic mistake (and another locksmith sending me a key did this!) of putting the key, on its own, in an ordinary envelope. Let’s see now: key = sharp & metal, envelope = fragile & paper ⇒ key leaving envelope somewhere on journey (and hopefully before our putative bent worker sees it).

I’ve just been to replace a lock. The lock I was replacing was the worst fitting I’ve ever seen. They hadn’t drilled out the cylinder hole to the correct diameter so there was no room for the security sleeve that normally wraps around the cylinder, they had recessed the keep into the frame on the wrong axis, which meant that they’d then had to recess the lock too deeply into the door in two axes, all of which meant that the back of the lock was impinging the end of the cylinder.

And to make matters worse, this was one of the most expensive and interesting locks on the market–a Chubb Ava auto-deadlocking rimlock–or 4L67. This is a very nice lock: it can’t be slipped; it’s strong and it’s almost unpickable. The key is very unusual looking; although if you have a Ford or a Jaguar or a motorcyle chain lock from Abus, you would recognise the style of key. It starts life as a cylinder and then has flats machined on it at different angles. These flats rotate unsprung discs inside the cylinder. Chubb use this lock on their high-security filing cabinets. It’s one of the few rimlocks achieving the BS3621 lock standard.

So, if your rimlock (your “Yale”) looks like an ordinary Yale at first glance, but has a square bolt and a key with no teeth, treat it nicely, don’t lose your keys and don’t get locked out, both of which would be very expensive.

Oh, and Chubb don’t supply the cylinder on its own! You always have to replace the entire lock.

How much of an appetite do readers have for locksmithing suggestions, I wonder. After all, you don’t want to go through a flight length checklist as you leave. But here’s a one-off check for right now if you have your keys; and it’s something to check again when you move into a new place. It concerns any kind of pin tumbler like the venerable Yale latch.

There’s a greater than one in ten chance that your latch key (your “Yale”) has a deep cut near the bow end. That’s no problem if the lock is working smoothly. However, if the lock is stiff or if you need to “jiggle” your key before it will start to turn, there’s a not insignificant risk that your key might snap off in the lock one day.

If your situation is the “jiggle” one, you could just try being careful (and sober); otherwise there isn’t much you can do except replace the cylinder and get good keys or sort out why the lock is stiff.

Close on the heels of the plea not to choose uPVC doors, comes a story of 14 uPVC windows.

The manufacturers of these accursed uPVC products tend to discontinue them after only a few years. And whereas wooden doors and windows can be kept in service for twenty years or more, once your uPVC window or door has failed (and it will) you won’t be able to repair – only replace.

I’ve just been to a job where the keys to the espag handles (espangnolette handles) on the uPVC windows were lost two occupants ago. Yes: the manufacturer has discontinued them and I can’t even get a key blank. All 14 handles will have to be replaced.

Your insurance policy might ask for for patio doors, etc. to be fitted with mortised rack bolts. Unlike the most obvious kind of bolts which would be fitted to the face of the door, mortised bolts are fitted within the door itself. From the outside all you see is a little hole into which you put your “star” key and which you then turn to extend or withdraw the bolt.

Rack bolts are very strong but there are a couple of points you should bear in mind.

Keep an eye on your builder and check that they don’t drill the key hole right the way through, as on one door I saw the other day! The whole idea is negated somewhat if there’s a keyhole on the outside!

Although they are strong when deployed, their winding mechanisms (the “rack”) are not strong. If you can’t operate the bolt with light finger pressure, stop. If you force it, you will strip the teeth off the rack. If that happens in the locked position then you will face an expensive exercise getting it open again. If the door is warped or swollen, try relieving the pressure on the bolt by gently pulling on the door handle while trying to wind the bolt in or out. If it’s getting more and more difficult to operate, get it seen to before it breaks.

No more than a couple of turns of the key are needed. Any more and, again, you will tend to strip the teeth. Try it with the door open while feeling or watching the bolt; note how many turns are needed.

If your rack bolts are fitted to windows, they might be the short variety. These aren’t much good as the bolt is so short. If you have to fit these (usually because the frame is too small for the regular size), make sure they aren’t recessed any more than they need to be. Recessing is when you chisel a shallow depression in the door edge for the bolt’s faceplate, and in the frame for the keep. I recently visited a property where there was already a 3 mm gap between the window and the frame, and where the fitter had gone on to recess the bolt and the keep each by 2 mm more than needed. Result? The bolt wasn’t actually engaging at all!