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).

I spent 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out why on earth a sliding patio door wouldn’t lock in the closed position yet operated perfectly well in the open position. Well of course, we go through this half-a-dozen times a week at spring time and winter time: the door heats up or cools down and the bolts, etc. no longer want to enter their keeps.

However, I’d tried every keep and they were all in the perfect position. So I tried it one more time and this time I stood outside. The handle had been fitted 90 degrees out and was fouling the frame. Doh!

I’ve just got back from a job at a new block of apartments in Wandsworth. Every rimlock was fitted upside-down. Some builder who hadn’t got much of a idea as to how doors and locks work – surprise, surprise – and worse than that, whose supervision must have been non-existent – had worsened things with a decision to fit all these locks production line style. Drill all the cylinder holes, screw all the back plates on, fit all the keeps, etc. Nasty shock time would have been when the time came to put the first cylinder in and he (or she) discovered that they should have used the template that comes with the lock as none of the locks were lined up with their cylinder holes, and the only way out was to fit every cylinder upside-down.

Well that was quite a month. We went on an Easter holiday to the Nile. And got stuck because of the ash cloud. We got back a few days ago after a holiday that got extended to three weeks. The tour operator and the local agent were fantastic. We were treated to a free week’s luxury accommodation and breakfast – so pretty much a week’s holiday in Egypt for the price of lunch and dinner! If anyone’s contemplating a holiday in Egypt, I’ll put up who they are.

Then there’s been a week of frantic catching up. The cat won’t let us out of its sight at the moment.

And frantic catching up isn’t helped by nuisance calls, which mostly still seem to be from BT’s CustomerStreet. I wish the OFT would hurry up and do whatever it is they are going to do about these pests.

When you ring a tradesperson from the office, you might consider whether of not your call will show up as “Number Withheld”. A sole trader who’s at the end of their tether over nuisance calls might be tempted to let “Number Withheld”s go to voicemail.

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.)

Back in the 1800s the slanging matches between the various lock manufacturers were pretty vitriolic affairs. One of the great stirrers of his day was a certain Alfred Hobbs. I’ll tell that story another day. (I’ve said that before I think; must get around to it. Wikipedia’s entry doesn’t look correct!)

Anyway, locksmithing is once again having a vitriolic spat. A new lock came on the market a little while ago; from Cisa, a well-respected lock and security company. I think their stuff is very good. Their electric release locks, for example, seem to go on forever. I’ve been wanting one for an experiment for years now, and every one I see on a problematic customer’s door is working fine and I can’t have it; the problem is always something else.

Another lock manufacturer, whose name isn’t far off the savoury pear whose name begins “Avoc…”, decided to rubbish this new cylinder as part of the marketing of their own new cylinder.

This undignified and unethical scheme has backfired on the unsavoury lock manufacturer in a rather spectacular way however. A couple of irked hobbyists have shown how two of the principal, purported selling points of the unsavoury manufacturer’s lock are miles off working satisfactorily.

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’ve had two weeks where almost every job suffered some kind of bugger factor and required a followup visit. Nobody’s fault; these things just happen; and they come in waves. You’ll have a week where you open five fire-safes and then you won’t see another for six months. You fit eight London bars in as many days, double your stock of them and then don’t get another request for weeks. But hey – the odd thing would be if there were no odd things.

Today, however, the gods were smiling. Initially it didn’t look good. It was pouring down and the door that needed opening had a lever lock and was set in an exposed wall. However I’d just bought a new, lined and hooded, hi-viz jacket that was still enjoying its waterproof flush of youth. I managed to park the van right outside, so I only needed to rust one expensive pick at a time. It turned out to be an uncurtained lock, which means that it could be picked in the traditional (easy) way. However–even better–the xxxxxxx keys which had been having a bad run and had not opened anything in months did the job.

Then I saw that the retaining screws had been completely burred over, meaning the lock wasn’t going to come out, and I’d have to make a return visit with the left-handed drill bits to drill the screws out (I’d neglected to put them back after using them in the workshop). But no. When I gave the screws an experimental whack with the sacrificial chisel the heads broke right off they were so rusty; and then they turned out not to be the retaining screws at all. Having wiped a cumulo-nimbus-worth of rain off my glasses, I saw they were just faceplate screws, with decent retaining screws underneath. And it wasn’t the old nasty Yale lever lock with plastic “springs” that I initially thought it might have been–was just weathering making it look so old–it was a newish Yale lever lock with a drop-in replacement available.

And the establishment turned out to be an inn. I was served a bowl of goulash, half a loaf of bread and a tankard of ale, by the fire, as well as my fee of course. (The tankard was small and it was the last job of the day.) Tra-la-la.

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.