Locksmithing and Security

If you’re going to make a lock that will carry on working though ten years and ten thousand operations, there has to be play in the handle and the mechanism. So the excellent Yale #1 and Yale #2 have “loose” handles — on day one.

Yale #1

So does the Unican mechanical digital lock.

Unican Simplex 1000

One thing you do have to watch out for on a Yale #1 or Yale #2 is that the securing screws — the little fellers above and below where the bolt comes out — do work loose. So if the whole lock is wobbly, tighten up those screws — just until they pinch — don’t over-tighten.

I attended a lost key lockout this morning where the door had two high security locks — unpickable and very expensive to destroy. And there were spare keys waiting inside.

It was a ground floor flat so I asked if there was access to the back door. No. We could try to raise a neighbour but there were high fences with a trellises between the properties. Anyway I’m not up for climbing fences today.

Ah, but the top flat are having an attic room added, the builders are there right now and there’s a ladder all the way (three stories) down to the back yard.

Neighbour and neighbour’s builders were happy for us to troop up and climb down. I wasn’t quite so happy as it was a very long ladder.

The back door was locked with a double euro profile cylinder and the keys were in the inside half of the cylinder and they were turned. So it took two bits of jiggery-pokery before I could start picking the lock. But eventually we were in.

Morals:

• Plan what you’re going to do if you lose keys to a high security lock. Have you got a friend who can hold a copy? Do you have the fitter’s or manufacturer’s telephone numbers?
• Leaving keys turned in the inside half of a double euro profile cylinder makes it more difficult for all but the most gifted locksmith (ahem) or burglar. (Euro profile cylinders are those upside-down exclamation mark shaped cylinders that go right through the door.)
• By contrast, leaving keys on the inside of a mortice lock, turned or not, makes it very easy for the thief. Don’t ever do it.

What is a dropped snib? Is it one of the many ailments that torment us over-fifties?

Snib or holdback are the correct terms for the part of a lock that stops a door latching behind you as you pop out to the dustbin in your dressing gown. It’s often incorrectly called the latch; latch, however, is what a door is doing if it locks as it closes, without your having to take any action other than close the door.

On locks that don’t have much sophistication, as well as holding the latchbolt open, the snib can also lock the latchbolt closed even against the correct key.

A dropped snib is when the snib gets loose, and when the lock is fitted to the unlucky side of the door, and when as you slam the door and it latches shut, the snib falls down and locks you out.

So, which way would your snib be going if it fell downwards? Would it be falling towards inactive? Nice green tick! Or falling towards active? Nasty red cross! If, for example, you had a Yale rimlatch lock on the right-hand side of your door (looking at the door from the outside), then I’m afraid it doesn’t fail safe, it fails the vexatious way.

If you have a simple latch lock and it’s on troublesome side of the door, keep an eye out for the snib getting loose and floppy.

If you like finding things to worry about, I have one more for you. Is there a big gap between the door and the frame? It has been known for a latch lock to be snibbed to the locked state while the door is actually open, and then for the door to slam shut. The gap is big enough that the bevelled latch bolt can enter the bolthole, but it can’t then be got out again.

Even one of the locksmith bulletin boards I’m on can’t get this one right!

A rim lock is one that is fixed to the inside face of the door. (Although it would not surprise me if one of the national call centres’ operatives, whose work I was tidying up after yesterday, had fitted a rimlock to the outside face of a door! Remember: the nationals are good at advertising and staffing call centres in a “cost effective way”; they are not good at locksmithing, plumbing, carpentry, …)

The alternative to a rim lock is a mortice lock. This is one that has been fitted into a chiseled-out hole (the mortice) in the door. As long as the door’s thickness is 44 mm or more, a mortice lock is usually more secure.

A different kind of classification (and this is where even my trade association’s bulletin board gets it wrong), is the way in which the lock works: most often the tumblers are either pins or they are levers. And normally pin tumblers are fiddly and small enough that they are encased in a, usually removable, cylinder. So pin tumbler locks can usually also be called cylinder locks.

The most common pin tumbler cylinder lock on wooden doors in the UK is the five-pin Yale. The most common mortice lock in London is the Chubb 114, which is a five-lever mortice lock.

Often, but definitely not always, a pin tumbler/cylinder lock is a rimlock and a lever lock is a mortice lock.

Well, if you care, hopefully that’s been of help.

Oh. Back, briefly, to the nationals. They are the ones with the huge adverts in the phone books where there are no local phone numbers visible. Naturally, I am going to say that 90% of the time, you’d be better off with a local tradesman (I wish I could say 99%, but there we are; I’d also like a Goldwing for Christmas). And if you are a local tradesman who’s kindly offered an 0800 or 0845 number, my advice would be to show your landline number as well, so that people can have confidence that you are local.

Are you the kind of person who likes to be prepared and who doesn’t like surprises and emergencies? Then you might like to check what locks are fitted to your front door. And if it turns out to be exotic or high security, you might want to recall or discover who fitted it or manufactured it. Then if, heaven forbid, you find you’ve been locked out one day — actually it’s never day it’s always night and a cold, wet and windy one at that — you’ll have a start on who might be able to get you back inside again. You might also want to ensure that a trusted friend who never takes holidays has a spare key.

If you have a Chubb, Yale, Union, ERA, Legge, Securefast, Walsall, Willenhall or Imperial, for example, then you have a regular lock. If you have a Banham, a MulTlock, a Gerda, a Bramah, for example, then you have a high-security or exotic lock. (If you have a Bramah lock you are in good and ancient company. Mr Pickwick had a Bramah.)

The local authority here has been fitting front doors with an imported lock system that would do the front door of a desirable castle proud: a lock that’s completely unique driving huge medieval bolts. However, lock yourself out and try calling said local authority and you will be told to call a locksmith. Call a locksmith and you will be told that they have no idea how to get you in.

If you have a local authority front door with a completely circular keyhole right in the middle of the door and some impressive boltwork on the inside, contact your local authority and get a definitive answer on how you a) get a spare key, and b) gain entry should you ever find yourself locked out.

If you’re not sure, and you’re living in the UK, leave a comment and I’ll venture an opinion on your lock’s surprise-quotient.

Normally I rescue people stuck outside and occasionally people stuck inside; and normally it’s the fire brigade who rescue cats — from trees, drains, etc.

Here, however, a living room door latch bolt had parted company with the tubular latch retraction hook. And a kitten was locked inside the living room.

I had a quick look at the window and, full marks, it had proper locks, so it was back to the door. The kitten seemed to think I’d been sent to alleviate its boredom. It had got tired of the food scraps the owner had been pushing under the door, so whenever I popped a mirror or other sundry device or instrument within its reach, it had a fine old time trying to pull it from my grasp.

It all ended well, I’m happy to report; although I should have remembered about the food scraps waiting for my hands and knees just inside the door.

It’s not just kittens who like to play with locksmith tools that appear through a door. Many of my colleagues have fallen to the dark side and open doors for the gas board, the electricity board and sundry others who’ve persuaded a Justice of the Peace to issue an entry warrant. I’m kidding about the dark side of course; my colleagues are the Jedi of the industry in that they rarely use a drill or other destructive means of entry (nor do they use light sabers which are pretty destructive), they pick their way in. But while someone who hasn’t paid their bill and is quietly watching the door from the inside isn’t going to grab a drill bit, they do tend to grab anything else they see. One of the many stress-increasing aspects that keeps me away from that side of the work.

I had a couple of safes to open a little while back. One was an elderly Chubb and the other was a more recent Dudley. Both were key locks. Safes are divided roughly 60:40 in the UK between key locks and combination locks whereas in the States they’re nearly all combination locks. Of course, key locks are much more difficult for the safe engineer to open. Anyway, these two need different techniques so I started with the one that needed the venerable Hobbs pick. (I’ll come back to Mr Hobbs another day in another post.)

First you get as comfortable as you can. Other locksmiths poke fun at my collapsible chairs but hey. Then you get acquainted with the levers — seven in this case. You’re doing a couple of things here but it’s quite repetitious. You either get bored on unlucky days or you enter a Zen-like altered state on lucky days. This was a lucky day.

I wasn’t aware of it — that’s the point — but after five minutes there was almost nothing in my mind except a growing picture of my friends the levers. What I was also unaware of was that the lights had gone out; this was a basement of a delicatessen undergoing refurbishment and they’d cut the power to install some board or other and they’d told everyone but me.

So there I was in a gloomy corner, dressed in black (good for the image), forehead resting on a safe door, making no noise except for the occasional and pleasing click of a tumbler; and there was the electrics board that was about to be replaced, above my head. The electrician walked in pointing her torch high up at the board. I wouldn’t have heard her even if she’d been wearing wooden clogs.

I think we both screamed. I certainly lost all the levers.

Still, I don’t normally need meditation classes.

I had a little rant about uPVC doors a few posts back. Well I don’t much like the cylinder that often goes with it, the euro-profile cylinder.

When lever locks wanted to be operable from both sides, the clever engineers at companies like Chubb thought carefully and insightfully about key symmetry and key differs. If you have a 5-lever mortice lock key and take a look at it you’ll see that it’s symmetric and that it has not 5 positions, not 10 positions but 7 positions (bittings they are called). (Unless you have an uncommon lock like a Securefast, Walsall, or one or two others.)

The first and third levers, counting outwards, are the same. This means that a reasonably short key can be used from both sides and still have enough lever variation to allow over a thousand different key possibilities. (If we call the levers A,B,A,D, and E, then a key that is EDABADE can operate the lock from both side while only sacrificing one lever’s worth of variation.)

When some miserable creature and their miserable company somewhere wanted to use a cylinder lock (like a “Yale”), rather than a lever lock, and also to be able to use the same key from both sides, they simply doubled the thing up and had a complete cylinder at either end. Well that’s not too bad — modern manufacturing can waste materials very efficiently; and with, for example, the Swedish profile cylinder system, it can be well designed and still quite secure. However, it requires two minutes more work to fit or change a “Swedish” cylinder, so this miserable creature (does anyone know who it was?) made a one-piece, double-ended cylinder — the euro-profile — the one that’s shaped a bit like an upside down exclamation mark. And when I say “solid”, it’s only just solid. Through truly stupid design, it’s actually very fragile in one very critical place and moderately fragile in others.

And because it’s one piece there are twenty different sizes to stock; and stock twice because you need to have them in brass and in nickel finishes.

And although this awful, wasteful device is the way it is in order to allow a key to work from both sides, if you accidentally leave a key in the inside half when you go out, you can’t actually use another key from the outside if the inside one has turned a little.

And — finally getting to what prompted this moan — if one of these things is fitted in a typical 45 mm door, their having duplicated the entire damned mechanism means that you can normally only get 5 pin tumblers each side unless you use a bigger cylinder than necessary, sticking out like handlebars, but allowing you to get a more secure 6 pin tumblers each side. So there’s no way for me to give one of yesterday’s customers what is needed.

So why don’t the States and continental Europe, and increasingly the UK, carry on fitting mortice deadlocks? Well it takes a bit more work as you have to chisel a nice neat, but quite large, hole in the door, if you’re fitting the lock later on in the life of the door. Or it’s more difficult and more expensive to manufacture if you’re mass producing doors. And perhaps, a lever lock key being longer and heavier, only the pockets and handbags of the UK of the previous century were up to carrying them.

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.