When I started locksmithing at the Cerrajería Ruíz in Mexico City, I’d frequently show up to a job and not have what I needed to complete it. It was sometimes necessary to hop on my bicycle and make one or two runs for tools and supplies before the job was done. Once when I apologized to a customer for the delay, he said, “What are you going to do—bring the entire shop with you in your backpack?” Because that’s what I carried—a single backpack full of tools. Sometimes I think back on what that guy said and chuckle because now I do in fact bring an entire shop with me. My van is not big enough to accommodate every last item I might need, but by asking the right questions before I show up, I’m able to complete the vast majority of jobs in one visit.

I was reminded of all this earlier this week when my van broke down and was out of commission for a day. My van is a rolling shop, and being without it makes my job much more difficult. The solution was to rent a sedan and stuff as many tools and supplies as I could into the trunk. Though I didn’t have my workbench to sit at, most of what I might need was in that trunk. Even with about eight backpacks’ worth of tools and supplies, I still felt crippled without my regular workspace.

That backpack I used in Mexico really just fit the bare essentials. Along with some basic hand tools and a baggie full of lock parts, I carried around a small pill bottle that was half-full with pins and springs of various sizes. Usually I didn’t need to touch them unless something sprung out of a lock and rolled into a crack in the floor. If I had to rekey a lock, I would take its pins out, reorder them, and then put them back in the lock. Then I’d use a round file to cut a new key to match the new pin sequence. If the customer wanted two keys, I’d hand-cut a second one. If he wanted a third, I’d tell him to go to hell. Cutting keys by hand is a lot of work. Each guy at the shop had a slightly different style and method of cutting his keys, and you could often tell who made a key just by the shapes of the cuts.

Here in the States, my time is too valuable for all that. I drive around with a bin of pre-cut keys and thousands of pins sorted into different sizes. The old keys and old pins are thrown into a bin for recycling and the lock gets new pins. If a customer wants extra keys, I use the well-calibrated duplication machine in my van to make as many copies of the original as are requested. If I need to make a car key, I can often find a blind key code, convert that to an actual key code using a web-based service available on my smart phone, and then perfectly cut the key to factory measurements. This is far easier than pulling the door apart to remove its lock cylinder, and then hand-cutting a key to match it.

I do travel around with boxes of used parts so that I can fix or replace broken locks at little added cost to the customer. This is the kind of thing we did in Mexico, and I find myself wasting huge amounts of time trying to make parts work together when they weren’t intended to do so, or installing a piece of used hardware to only then remember why it was removed in the first place. It would be so much easier to swap out the old locks for shiny new ones at a healthy markup. In Mexico the customers were suspicious if we told them their fifty-year-old locks were broken beyond repair. I understand the value of time—both mine and that of my customers—and yet I still do this. It’s partly due to my reluctance to run up the bill, and partly because I just get much more satisfaction out of repairing a lock than replacing it.

Adapting the practices I learned as an apprentice in a Mexican locksmith shop to the realities of a first-world economy is an ongoing process, but I’ll never regret that I learned how to do things the hard way before I learned how to do them the easy way..