Locksmithing and Security

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!

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.

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.