Locksmithing and Security

I’ve said it before (I think) but I’ll say it again…

I would avoid bi-fold, i.e. concertina doors. They seem attractice for nice days. Lots of light coming into the kitchen-dining room. A garden and a kitchen that are almost one.

However, unless they are of the highest quality and very expensive, they tend to go wrong. Either they are on tracks, which will tend to sieze up; or they all hang off one poor set of hinges which are never strong enough. All doors move with the seasons and the chances that the bolt holes and keeps will line up with their bolts for a long lifetime are poor. Many lunatic manufacturers put a lock near a closing hinge such that if you forget and leave the key in and then open to door, the key gets broken and the door gets chunks gouged out.

They’re also murder to work on. There’s very little that I could repair. Mostly you have to get the fitters or manufacturers back; and of course, they’ve gone out of business.

And they are difficult as far as insurance is concerned. When most policies are describing what is acceptable in the way of security, it’s usually unclear which category bi-folds or concertinas fit into. So there’s plenty of wriggle room for the insurers to get out of paying your claim. And most of the candidate categories that they might fall into would tend to specify key operated bolts anyway; whereas only about 1 in 5 have key operated bolts.

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!

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.