Yesterday we considered how the locks on a typical, tradition, wooden door might be described. A typical modern composite or PVC-U door, on the other hand, will be a little different. It is highly likely that it will have a…
Blog Archives
This Handle’s Loose
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”…
Up And Down And In
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…
Dropped Snib
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…
Posted in advice, locksmithing Tagged with: dropped, dropped snib, holdback, latch, lock, snib, yale
Lock Terminology
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…
Posted in advice, locksmithing Tagged with: cylinder, lever, lock, mortice, rim, rimlock, terminology, yale
Know Your Locks
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…
Kitten Rescue
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…
Who Needs Meditation?
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…
Posted in life, locksmithing Tagged with: chubb, combination, dudley, key, lock, lock pick, meditation, opening, pick, picking, safe, zen
The Euro Profile
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…
Posted in locksmithing Tagged with: bad design, design, euro, euro-profile, lock, PVC-u, singe point of failure, swedish oval, uPVC
Double-Locking a Rimlatch
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…