Locksmithing and Security

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!

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).

If you’ve bought or are renting a newly built apartment, it’s quite possible that you and everyone else in your building are out at work all day. Which means that the entire building might be unoccupied during the day. (Unless you’re rich young professional, in which case there’s a porter or concierge.)

We are seeing more and more break-ins where the thieves have been able to make as much noise with power tools (e.g. chain saws!) as they like.

Have you considered a neighbourhood watch. Or seeing if you can get everyone in the building to contribute towards CCTV cameras?

If you do either of these, ensure that they’re prominently signed. And ensure that any camera are prominent and that their fittings are hidden or very robust.

Customers quite often ask me what the best lock would be. However, quite often we are standing next to a door that the big, bad wolf wouldn’t even have to huff over — one small puff and it would be open.

The physical strength of the the door and frame are just as important as the lock. This is especially true around here (London) where nearly all break-ins I attend are literally that: smashing the door in.

A solid door is better than a hollow door or a panelled door. Raised moldings can make it look nicer; panels simply make it easier to burst through. If you must have panels — of wood or of glass — you really need to consider a mesh or a grille on the inside. If grilles or meshes over panels are aesthetically unacceptable then you need to consider a monitored alarm or a big dog.

I’m sometimes asked to fit another mortice deadlock, but in a door that’s too thin or too insubstantial. I’m afraid that cutting a big hole in a door that’s less than 44 mm thick, or that’s hollow, simply makes it easier to burst open.

Are the door or frame cracked or split, especially around the locks and their keeps? Minor cracks and splits can be dealt with via strengthening plates and bars. Major cracks or splits really require the attention of a good carpenter.

My goodness, there are some stupendously incompetent cowboys about.

Yale’s top-end domestice rimlatch is the PBS. It’s British Standard rated. That’s not easy to achieve in a rimlatch. Yale have gone to a lot of trouble to make it strong and secure. And you will be paying a lot of money if you buy one.

All of the components contribute to its strength, it’s security and to its BS rating. Omit one of those components and the BS rating is invalidated.

I’ve just been to change a PBS-1′s cylinder. Whoever fitted the lock originally hadn’t bothered with the pesky bolts that secure the escutcheon to the door (the escutcheon is what surrounds the keyway); I guess it was too much effort to drill two more holes of just the right size hole in just the right place. They hadn’t bothered with the anti-drill spin plate covering the cylinder plug; I guess they dropped it and couldn’t be bothered looking for it. They hadn’t bothered with the hardened clip that prevents the cylinder retaining screws being attacked; “Duh. What’s this? Oh it comes off. Can’t see what that’s for. Bin it.”

So the customer had paid £100 for a lock (and goodness knows how much the “fitter” demanded) that was hardly any more secure than a £30 lock. And if a BS-rated rimlatch had been a requirement of their insurance policy, then their insurance company would easily have wriggled out of paying any break-in claim.

What does it mean when a lock is BS (that’s “British Standard” rather than bullshit)? Does that mean that my insurance company will be happy? (This post is largely addressed to the UK.)

Well you can be fairly sure that a BS lock is reasonably good. However, the reverse does not necessarily apply. Just because a lock isn’t BS, it doesn’t mean that it’s of lesser quality. Two of the best locks ever — the Ingersoll SC71 and the Chubb 110 have not been BS for much of their career. Yet if you have that pair of locks on your door, a skilled locksmith will have a very tough time getting you in, so a thief is in for an almost impossible time. Although as we’ve said many times, the locks on the front door are only secondary in importance to physical strength of the door and frame, the illumination, the state of the window locks and what’s around the back.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that your insurance company will be happy either. I’m afraid you really do have to read the policy. The commonest thing your insurance will ask for is a five-lever mortice deadlock on the final exit door (the one you can’t bolt from the inside because you will be on the outside). It might go further and ask for a BS 3621 five-lever mortice deadlock. It might just ask for a BS 3621 lock.

If you do have the excellent Chubb 110 and your insurance policy asks for a five-lever deadlock you ought to get written confirmation (good luck) that the Chubb 110 is acceptable (as it should be) since for technical reasons lost to the mists of time, Chubb decided to term the 110 a five-detainer lock. It is, as I’ve already mentioned, at least as good as, if not better than your typical five-lever lock.

Not all mortice deadlocks are lever locks. In the States, for example, very few locks are lever locks. The other main kind of lock is a pin tumbler lock. Your Yale latch lock will almost certainly be a pin tumbler lock. So what? Well if you squint into your pin tumbler lock’s keyway, you will actually be able to see the pins. They’re little brass pins of a couple of millmetres diameter. If you can see them though, you can attack them. The lever tumblers of a lever lock are deep inside the lock and way more difficult to attack.

It could turn out then, that you have a pin tumbler cylinder operated mortice deadlock on your door. If you have, its key will not be the traditional “keyhole” kind of key with a blade and a stem. Instead your key will be a “Yale” style key turning in a cylinder and with the cylinder operating the deadbolt. Again, if your insurance policy asks for a five-lever mortice deadlock, then you might not be covered. Get written confirmation.

If you have a pair of keyed-alike (same key operates both) Banham locks, which are quite common in London, and your insurance asks for a five-lever deadlock, once again you should get written confirmation that your locks are acceptable. Banham do produce a fine lever lock but the typical pair of Banham locks encountered on London doors will both be cylinder operated and neither, therefore, will be a five-lever lock.

Once or twice a month we (at least I assume it happens to other locksmiths) get a call along the lines of, “I’m abroad at the moment. There are some xs I’ve left in my flat. Will you go and let my friend in so’s he can y them to me.”

I’m afraid we won’t. Like the “constitution” of the UK, the law about what locksmiths can or can’t do isn’t written down. We spend most of our time in an arrestable state. Simply carrying the tools of our trade could be interpreted as going equipped to steal. Carrying a knife of any size is an offense unless it can fold and chop your finger off. (Knives with locking blades, even those shorter than the time-honoured three inches, currently count as fixed blade weapons.) Now of course any citizen of the UK can be arrested at any time for a whole raft of offenses, so we’re used to this. Even if you’ve ensured you have straw under the seat of your taxi, even if you did your archery practice last Sunday, you can still always be arrested for a Breach of the Peace, which means whatever the officer wants it to mean. (OK, I think the straw and the archery laws are no longer on the books, but they were there for a long time.) And of course as of the last few weeks, you can be arrested for photographing anything an officer deems sensitive. I’m slightly astonished that the footage (and photographers) of the events preceding the death of  Ian Tomlinson at the recent London G20 protests saw the light of day.

So I’m certainly not going to aid and abet anyone other than the rightful occupant in getting into their premises.

Naturally, there will be occasions when such a request is genuine. There are also occasions where a landlord by any reasonable judgement ought to be admitted to their premises. But I’m afraid the ice gets even thinner in these circumstances and our skates are not light.

What do you think?

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.

Many customers don’t realize that their rimlatch (their “Yale”) lock might be of the double-locking type.

If there’s a keyway in the inside handle, what’s it for? Well, first of all it might not work. If you had the outside cylinder (or barrel) changed at some point because of lost or otherwise compromized keys, chances are that you didn’t get the inside cylinder re-keyed at the same time, so it needs a different, probably lost, key.

Its purpose is twofold: to lock the bolt and to lock the inside handle/knob. I’ll come back to a more detailed explanation of the former in a moment.

Why would you lock the inside handle? Because if someone has broken into your property at the back, they would probably prefer to carry your plasma screen TV out of the front door. But if you’ve locked the handle they can’t.

Your rimlatch might still be double locking even if there’s no keyway in the inside handle. It’s quite often the case that you can lock the bolt and the inside handle/knob if you turn your key full circle in the opposite direction to the normal, unlocking direction.

Now, the main reason for this post if you’ve the latter variety of double-locking rimlatch, is to warn you that you might lock someone in one day. It goes like this: you never realized that the latch was double locking; you left as usual pulling the door shut behind you; you realized you’d forgotten your umbrella; you unlatch the door leaving your key in the lock as you grab your umbrella; then you pull the door shut again and turn the key. Now anyone left inside can’t get out. Even if they have their outside key they can’t unlock the inside handle. The only thing they can do is call to a hopefully honest passerby and pass them their key through the letter slot.

By the way, if your key takes three-quarters of a turn to open the door, rather than the more normal quarter turn, then it’s possibly a double-locking lock that’s had its double-locking disabled.

(In the UK, you may well have a mortice lever deadlock as well as a latch. Once that’s locked then your door has also been secured in both directions. For some reason mortice deadlocks never gained popularity in the States or in continental Europe, where break-ins are easier — although not necessarily more common — Brits seemingly being a villainous lot.)

What do we mean by locking the bolt? A latchbolt latches: you don’t need to use any key in order to make the door shut behind you. This happens because the latch is sprung and the closing face of the latchbolt is angled whereas the opening face of the latchbolt is flat. This convenience is also a security hazard because a burglar might be able to get something to push against the sloping face and unlatch the lock. So that’s why we might want to lock the latchbolt.

(If a lock bolt is unsprung and a key required both to shut it and to open it, it’s what we call a deadbolt — it’s not live, i.e. sprung.)

Some expensive locks — like an Ingersoll — automatically deadlock as they latch shut.