Locksmithing and Security

What can you do about the security of your communal door, particularly if you live in a flat in a converted house? The unfortunate answer is, not much.

The first problem is when there’s an electronic entry system of the cheap kind. The cheap kind puts the release solenoid in the keep which is the bit that goes on the frame. This means that all of the lock manufacturers’ clever devices to stop their latch locks being manipulated open no longer work because the keep is the wrong shape. Some lock manufacturers will supply an appropriate electronic keep but they’re more expensive than the general-purpose ones so they tend not to get fitted. (Ingersoll’s excellent SC71 has an electric keep option, for example.) Another better option, also expensive, is to put the release solenoid in the lock — the part on the door itself. Cisa is one of the best known and well regarded of these. In addition to the cost, however, they are also trickier to fit as far as the wiring is concerned.

The second problem is that most conversions’ front doors have the traditional nightlatch plus mortice deadlock. It’s dangerous and inconvenient to use the deadlock (you really don’t want to find yourself trapped in the hallway behind a locked front door and with the deadlock’s key the other side of the fire), so only the latch is used.

Thirdly, the communal door will get twice as much use but much less care and attention, so it will tend to fall apart.

Well you have to summon up the willpower (and the landord) to make the communal door at least a little bit of a challenge to the thief. Get any poor woodwork properly repaired by a competent carpenter. Get the keeps and locks securely attached and consider a London bar to further strengthen the keeps. And get a cowl or a mailguard bag over your letterslot.

What else can you do? One of the most important things is a PIR-activated porch light that is bright and directed, and that comes on when someone is about half-way up the garden path. And if there are tall hedges hiding the doorway from the road, get them trimmed.

You can consider replacing the old lever mortice deadlock with a cylinder-operated mortice deadlock where the cylinder has a thumbturn on the inside. Then there should be no chance that someone will get locked in. However, there will still be some dwellers who can’t be bothered to put the key in and lock the door when they go out.

So, whilst you should obviously do your best with the communal door, you should focus even more of your attention on your flat door. If you check your insurance policy (and you should), you may find that it doesn’t even mention the communal door; it will probably be talking about your flat door.

So despite your best efforts, thieves may well get into the hallway — coming in on someone’s heels — taking advantage of someone who didn’t bother to set the deadlock — and once the’re inside and out of sight they can pretty much take their time and make plenty of noise with impunity.

What do you do if there are windows at the back of your property — which must apply to just about everybody except non-ground-floor flat dwellers?

You can consider grilles. I don’t like the huge concertina grilles very much. They look overpowering even when drawn back; and they can trap fingers. Strap grilles are quite good; they’re fairly unobtrusive.

For a general increase in security at the rear once you fitted good locks, the next thing to sort out is light. Obviously there are daytime break-ins so it’s not an absolute. But it’s a good deterrent when a thief raising its ugly head over the fence/wall/trellis suddenly activates a nice powerful light.

But do have them infra-red activated, do adjust them for sensitivity and for daylight level, do put them up high and do get them with a metal grille over the front.

It’s not a good idea to leave keys in lever locks. I remember back when I was a student, in a shared house, and responsible for my own security for the first time, assuming that as long as there wasn’t a gap under the door big enough for the pencil and sheet of newspaper trick, that leaving the key in the back door would make it more difficult to pick open. (We are talking about a lever lock here — where the key disappears inside a traditional keyhole.)

Little did I know. Firstly, almost no thieves pick locks — certainly not those of student hovels just around the corner from the Coronation Street set in Salford — they just break the door or the frame. Secondly, it actually makes it easier for the thief who knows what he or she is doing (so still pretty rare) to open the lock.

Profile cylinder locks are different, however. As long as there’s no letter-slot — and surely no-one these days is going to leave a key anywhere near a letter-slot — a key left in the inside keyway of a keyed-both-sides profile cylinder (of the kind usually found on uPVC doors) makes it much more difficult to pick open the lock. Or for that matter, even to open the lock normally. In fact it’s a prime cause of people becoming locked out.

I’ve just put the finishing touches to my own door. (Don’t worry, though, I won’t take over two weeks on any of your jobs.) The locks have been moved, the keeps have been moved, holes have been filled in and the door’s been re-painted. (And I hate painting, so among the many jobs I’d love you to ask me to do for you, I’m afraid you won’t find painting.)

The last job was to re-attach the “chain”. And that’s what prompted this post. My chain is actually a hoop, a door restrictor, like the one pictured here.

And, in a television program I was watching just after I’d finished, someone came in through their front door and put a titchy little door chain on.

If you’re thinking of adding a door chain, don’t bother; they’re not strong enough. Fit a restrictor instead. And chuck away the miserable little screws that come with it; use some decent sized ones instead, especially on the frame which is what takes the pull force.

And think about whether you can actually see through the gap when you open the restricted door. If you want to see who’s calling, consider a spy-hole instead. In a typical hall-way, the only thing you can do is talk through a restrictor or chain. If you can’t fit a spy-hole and you can’t see though the gap, consider a small mirror on the wall near the frame.

I almost forget why I started the last post. It was actually to talk about the necessary evil that is the letterslot.

The previous post began the story of my re-arranging the locks on my front door. The mortice lock I was adding had a thumbturn on the inside. When I go out during the night or early in the morning, leaving the rest of the family asleep, I’d like to lock the door behind me. But you shouldn’t do that with an ordinary mortice lock like a Chubb because of the fire risk. So my new mortice lock would have a key on the outside and a thumbturn on the inside. (Naturally we can do the same for your door.)

But a thumbturn near a letterslot brings an obvious risk. So I thought about letterboxes and slot cowls. Then I remembered a story from an inventors’ web site: the Homeguard Mailguard. This is a smart bag that’s fitted over the letterslot. It keeps your mail from gathering in a large pile on the floor — a dead giveaway if you’re on holiday, it keeps your mail away from the peanut-brained dog, it means you don’t have to bend down to collect your mail, it stops fishing for keys or thumbturns, and should anything incendiary arrive through the slot the bag’s material stifles the flames.

And, naturally, we can fit one for you as well.

I’ve been playing around sorting my own front door out. You know the saying: the cobbler’s kids are the poorest shod.

Well someone in the family lost their keys and I went to change the cylinder. (Which we can do for you of course. And maybe for less than you think. If anyone tells you you’ll need a new lock, say no and come to us. We’ll change the cylinder or the levers at a third of the price.)

Ever since we’ve moved in, I’ve vaguely noted the locks weren’t that well fitted. It’s always a fiddly business, lining up the cylinder with the lock but this just wouldn’t have it. I squinted through the hole and saw that the lock backplate was miles off centre. The backset (distance from door edge to cylinder centre) turned out to be 35 mm for a 40 mm backset Yale #2 lock. It’s a miracle (and a thick door) that the original cylinder ever worked at all. There was no way the cylinder I wanted to put in was going to work. (I wanted to re-pin the handle so that the inside key and the outside key were the same once again. So that meant fitting a cylinder that was the 6-pin version of the inside keyway. And it meant I could use an accidental purchase that had been hanging around in stock for months.)

There was nothing for. I would have to move the cylinder. Out came the trusty old curtain pole which is my source of 32 mm wooden dowel and I plugged the old hole. I decided to sort another couple of things out at the same time. The cylinder lock had originally been fitted at waist height whereas it would normally be at a thirteen-year-old’s eye height. And they’d wasted the only place in the door that would take a large mortice lock, on this poorly-fitted cylinder lock. And I wanted for various reasons to fit a particular mortice lock that was a little on the large size. So here was my opportunity to free up the space. So the cylinder lock went back in a foot higher.

Then I set to fitting my mortice lock. And the troubles began. Normally I use a magnet before fitting a customer’s lock in case there are any lumps of steel in the door that are going to break my mortice cutter. But as I was constrained to fit my new lock in exactly one position I didn’t bother with the magnet. And, yes, there was an enormous steel noggin just protruding into the mortice cavity. I sorted that out and then went to fit the equally enormous keep box to the frame. I couldn’t believe it but there was another enormous lump of metal in the way!

I’ve never encountered a customer’s door that was so much trouble and long may that continue.

Lots of new apartment blocks sprang up around here during the boom years, while New Labour was carrying where the previous government left off in its efforts (along with the Americans) to set up the spectacular bust we have just witnessed. (At least the Americans were up-front about having an idiot “running” the executive.)

Anyway the build quality of these blocks, as you would expect, is lamentable. The problem that brings customers to me is the quality of the front door and its furniture. I’ve already mentioned the door furniture, so on to the doors themselves. Chipboard. Even at its best it’s not strong enough to resist a good kicking. At its worst not enough resin of the right formulation will have been used and you’ve effectively got a thin-walled box of sawdust guarding your apartment. Add to that the use of the thinnest door they can get away with and the mortice deadbolt lock will simply burst right out of the door when it’s kicked.

Yesterday, I had to go to a new block where several apartments had been broken into, and where the builder had been as bad as ever and the architect had been even less security-conscious than usual. The doors were chipboard with very little resin. And each pair of apartment doors were closed off from the corridor behind an extra door thus keeping the thieves warm, comfortable, and out of sight and earshot as they kick the apartment door in.

What can you do? You can consider fitting a new solid door of course. You can fit mortice lock strengthening plates, which will help strengthen things a little bit. And if the block is absolutely new, form an action group to harry the architect and builder.

Many insurance policies ask for a mortice lock on the final exit door — the front door for most of us. This is because you can’t bolt the final exit door from the inside if you’re going out, and a rimlatch isn’t particularly secure. (A rim lock is fitted to the face of the door and a mortice lock is fitted within the door.)

So a mortice lock makes sense. Unless, that is, your door isn’t thick enough. To get a mortice lock into the door, you need a hole (the “mortice”). If your door is less than 44 mm thick, then the hole for, say, a Chubb lock weakens the door more than the lock strengthens the door.

(There’s another problem, of course: PVC doors are becoming more and more common, but insurance company personnel aren’t becoming any more intelligent. Many insurance policies don’t consider the completely different locking regime of PVC doors)

Thin doors often come about when Bodgit & Rakeitin carry out a conversion of a house into flats and fit internal quality doors for the flat doors.

What do you do if your insurance company insists that you weaken your front door? Change your insurance provider for one that isn’t exclusively populated by bean-counters and where there’s actually someone who is knowledgeable about security.

And if you’ve got a door that’s hovering around the 42 or 43 mm thickness and it already has a mortice lock, you have to ask yourself if it’s wise to add another mortice lock and put another big hole in it.

I mentioned elsewhere, a front door around where I live, fitted with three high security locks. Yesterday I came across a tiny, insubstantial shed door, where the same triplet of locks had been fitted, two of which were mortice locks!

If you’re booking a locksmith, or any kind of tradesman, I suggest that you let them know in advance if there is no parking whatsoever where you live.

It’s no good hoping that they’re magicians or athletes with no heavy kit or that they’re going to abseil in from a hovering helicopter. If a tradesman arrives and finds, for example, that it’s residents-only parking for half-a-mile in all directions, and that the contact number is permanently engaged, then if said tradesman is less than a level-eight saint, they might just turn around and head straight for their stress therapist. And the customer will have waited in for naught.

If, on the other hand, a customer says, “We’ll need to find a day where you can come around after four-thirty because that’s when the parking restrictions end”, or “I’ve a visitors parking permit for you”, everyone is heading for a positive and enriching experience.

I’ve probably mentioned before what a nice lock the Ingersoll SC71 is. It’s very unusual in that it’s a 10-lever cylinder rimlock. It’s also very secure. Just about no-one can pick it; and it’s very tough to open destructively.

One niggle and one cautionary note though: the quality of the lock body seems to be deteriorating; and the cost of a replacement cylinder sometimes causes people to adapt a cheaper cylinder and use it in place of a new Ingersoll cylinder.

It’s possible to come across old Ingersoll SC71s that are still working after 20 or more years. But these days the lock bodies seem to last less than 10. However, for those 10 years it’s still an excellent lock.

If you have an Ingersoll lock, then before congratulating yourself check the cylinder to ensure that someone hasn’t replaced it with an inferior one. The genuine Ingersoll cylinder is quite unique. It has a slightly domed front, the keyway is wave-shaped and symmetric, and the key is double sided in that, unlike, say, a Yale which would have teeth only down one edge, an Ingersoll key has teeth down both edges (and to help you insert it the right way round, the hole in the bow is offset).