Author: admin

“Fixing” a Bathroom Lock

Last week I got a call from a restaurant in Woodinville that wanted to replace the failing hardware on its bathroom doors. I suggested I come by with a couple of commercial-grade privacy levers and put them on the doors. Privacy knobs and levers are what we have on our own bathrooms and bedrooms. They lock from the inside more as an indicator of occupancy than an obstacle to entry. They can be unlocked without a key – sometimes with a toothpick or skewer through a little hole on the outside half, and sometimes using a coin in a slot that sort of looks like a keyhole. The restaurant manager said he’d prefer keyed entry levers to provide a real sense of safety in his single-occupancy bathrooms. And he needed this done quickly.

I had reservations, but did as the customer asked. Most commercial-grade knobs and levers have a key difference from residential-grade ones. Rather than having a simple button to lock the door or a turnpiece to lock it, there’s a turn-button that both pushes AND turns. When you just push the button in, the door remains locked until 1) someone opens it with a key from the outside or 2) someone turns the knob or lever from the inside, whereupon the button pops out to the unlocked position. But if you push AND turn, the door remains locked until the turn-button is deliberately returned to the unlocked position (by twisting back to the unlocked position). The trouble is that from the inside, the door always feels unlocked, so you can always turn the knob or lever and walk out without unlocking the door. This is how almost all commercial-grade keyed levers function, and it often causes lockouts. But this is what I installed because it was all I could get quickly to meet the customer’s specifications.

As I drove from the restaurant to the next job, I was kicking myself for not pushing back harder on installing those locks. The management had the keys to the bathroom in case a customer accidentally left one of the doors locked, but I realized it was way too likely that customers would walk into a bathroom, push and twist the turnpiece upon entry, and then walk out of the bathroom without thinking to unlock the door. I wondered to myself how long it would be before I got a call from them. Sure enough, before I’d reached my next job the manager of the restaurant had reached the same conclusion and wanted me to come back to change the locks.

I wasn’t available to return until the next day, so I had a bit of time to think about a solution. These were relatively expensive entry levers I put on his doors, and since they had been installed in bathrooms, it wouldn’t have been right for me to put them back in the boxes and sell them as new to someone else, even if they’d only been in use for half a day. I didn’t want to charge the customer more because I knew I was at fault for failing to stridently object to that lock option. I also didn’t want to eat the cost of these locks myself.

So I came up with another solution. I disabled the turn function on the turn-buttons, so whether a customer pushed or pushed and turned, the doors would never remain locked upon being opened. This was NOT a factory setting. I did this by removing a piece of metal from the lock with a cutoff tool. On the fully assembled lock, there was no visible change to the hardware. But inside the lock, a piece of the chassis had been removed. Since making this change (see photos below) I have not gotten a callback. However, these were ANSI Grade 2 levers, rated for 400,000 cycles. Maybe my alteration will significantly shorten the life of the locks. If I get called back to this restaurant in a few weeks, months, or years, I’ll come back to this post and edit it into a cautionary tale about how not to fix a lock.

Criminal Behavior

I made a mistake that might have amounted to a crime. We’ll say that it was in another state and that the statute of limitations for the offense has expired. But I remember it like it was yesterday.

A property manager whom I know and trust sent me the contact information of a tenant who was having a problem with her lock. In a friendly young voice, the tenant explained that her deadbolt wasn’t working properly. She wasn’t home, but I could go and open her door and fix it in her absence. I would find an operating key on her kitchen counter.

When I arrived at her apartment, I could see that the deadbolt was crooked on her door. I got out my lock picks and felt inside the lock. Everything seemed normal. Within a minute the door was open and I was looking at the inside portion of the lock, which also seemed fine. I went to the kitchen to look for the key to see how it would work in the lock. The counter was piled with stuff — mail, coins, boxes of medicine with Cyrillic lettering on them — but no key that I could find. I scanned the apartment, looking for the key on other surfaces. The sofa had a blanket laid neatly across the cushions. The China cabinet was full of fine ornate dishes and glassware. It suddenly occurred to me that this looked very much like an old lady’s apartment. I took out my phone and called the tenant, who confirmed that I had entered the wrong unit.

I quickly left the apartment and closed the door. After looking down the long hallway in both directions, I crouched down and began to use my lock picks to pick the lock again, but this time to the closed position. But I was nervous and my hands weren’t steady enough for the job. I knew that if someone came out of an apartment and found me messing with the lock of a resident to whom I had absolutely no connection, I could quickly find myself in a lot of trouble, whether or not it was an honest mistake. I could be arrested. I could lose my license. I might have to go back to working in the salt mines. I wasn’t going to be able to do this quickly enough. I gave up on the lock picks.

I stood up and basically fled. Once back to my van, I considered what I should do. I thought about leaving a note and a business card in the woman’s apartment, explaining what had happened and apologizing for the error. But then I thought better of leaving a written confession at the scene of the crime. I considered just leaving the door unlocked and forgetting about it. But leaving some lady’s home unsecured like that would have been pretty unethical. She could have been burglarized. More likely, she might have come home and been deeply unsettled to find her door unlocked. I couldn’t do that. Plus, maybe it would prompt her to have someone pull security camera footage.

I resolved that I had to close the door properly. So I took from my van a tool that I was confident would work to pick the lock very quickly. I slipped the tool into my pocket and started back up the stairs to the apartment. As I was halfway up I heard someone following me up. I slowed my pace and let the person pass me. It was an older woman carrying a bag of vegetables. She looked Russian. I followed her down the hall a little before I said, “Excuse me, are you in 304?” She turned to me as she came to her door and said, “Da, tree-oh-four,” rolling her Rs. She pulled her keys out of her pocket and she eyed me suspiciously.

I told her, “Your door is already open.” Her facial expression did not change. Then I nervously launched into an apologetic ramble about who I was and what had happened. All the while she was saying, “Okay, da, okay,” as she nodded her head at me and used her key in the already-unlocked door. I guess she got tired of me because as I carried on, she reached for the handleset of her front door, pushed down on the thumbpress, and quickly went inside, saying, “OK, thenk you,” through the gap in the closing door. I have no idea whether she had understood me or if she was simply too distracted by me to notice that her key had not retracted the bolt. Either way, it seemed like I didn’t have a problem.

Had she arrived fifteen seconds later and found me crouched at her door trying to manipulate her deadbolt without a key, I believe I would have had a hard time effectively explaining myself to her. Although no harm was done, this was a reminder to take great care when entering the homes of people who are not physically present, even if it seems like I have their permission.

Sliding Glass Doors

Is your sliding glass door locked? Is it secure?

Yesterday I had two very similar lockout calls. On both calls, I showed up and the customer pointed to a door at the front of the house, expecting that I would bypass the offending lock. On both calls I did a tour around the house to find an easier way in. On both calls I quickly got in through the sliding patio door. The first one was straight-up unlocked. That was easy enough. On the second house, the door was locked and I opened it in a matter of seconds without any tools.

It’s easy to leave your sliding door unlocked and let it sit like that for days or weeks. But even when it’s locked, it’s not always that secure. Patio door locks tend to be kind of dinky. Like the majority of locking doorknobs out there, they’re sufficent for keeping out toddlers and the merely curious, but not someone more determined to get in. The kind of patio door lock with two hooks is markedly better than the kind with just one, but retrofitting your door to accommodate that is not worth the trouble. There’s an easier solution.

When I look at sliding glass doors, I check for three things:

1) the dinky little lock should work (to keep out marauding toddlers);

2) should that lock fail, be defeated, or be left unlocked, there should be something in place to keep the door from sliding open;

3) there should be something in the upper part of the track (above the door) to prevent the door from being lifted directly off the track.

Assuming you already have the dinky lock in place and it works properly, the rest of the job is cheap and easy.

To prevent the door from sliding, you could buy and install a Charley Bar, which is a square aluminum rod that sits across the door at about waist level and is, in my opinion, very ugly. They also make locks that sit at floor level and secure the door with a peg that goes into a hole you’ve drilled into the track or the frame of the inactive door. Usually when I encounter these, they’re broken or the peg no longer aligns with the hole because the house has settled and shifted.

Even though it’s too simple a solution to profit handsomely from, I favor the ol’ wooden rod in the track. Specifically, I buy these cedar rods from Home Depot for $2 apiece. They’re 2″ x 2″ x 3′ and tend to fit really snugly right in the track. I’m always careful when I pick them from the pile because many of them are warped or knotted. I like to lay them on the floor to test them for straightness. When I get it to the house, I lay it next to the door and carefully mark where I need to cut it, making sure not to cut off any more than necessary. Sometimes if they sit loosely in the track, they can be flipped out of the track from outside the house.

Occasionally instead of using the cedar rod I cut down a chrome shower curtain rod and cover the ends with cane tips. It’s a lot more attractive and I charge a big markup to reward myself for my ingenuity. In my own house, the cedar rod is good enough.

The next part of this project involves preventing the door from lifting. Check the track above the door. If you see a piece of plastic glued in there, you should go open a beer to celebrate a job well done. Otherwise, you need to put something in there. One option is to cut off a wafer from the end of the remaining cedar rod and screw that into the upper track. The space between the door and the top of the track varies between doors, but you might want the piece to be about 3/8″ thick. Cut two pieces to install above each end of the door in its closed position. Test that they’re not too thick for the door to slide past them before you do any more work. As close to the edges of the wafer as possible, drill some holes and then counter-sink them with a larger drill bit so that the screws will be flush with the surface of the wood. Again, these blocks need to extend as far down as possible without interfering with the motion of the door.

Now screw the pieces of wood into the track. Mark and pilot the holes if necessary. But if you have any sitting around, I’d recommend using 1-1/2″ self-tapping flat-head screws. If you don’t, I’d recommend just using whatever you can find. It’s not that important. You can glue them in place if you want. You can even tape them. But be careful! Cedar is soft. Screw these blocks in too tightly and they will split. Seriously, just breathing too hard around them is almost enough to make them split. If one does split, you have the option of taking the wood, throwing it away, and just leaving the screws in place. That’s a totally legitimate way of doing this project. If you do end up tossing the wood, you’ll be happy that you placed the screws as close to the edges of the track as possible, as the door is often hollow in the middle. Screws in the center of the track won’t keep anyone from lifting the door. Once the pieces are in, test the door for lift. If you can’t lift the closed door off of the track, it’s time for a beer.

Before you put too much work into this project, remember that your door is made of glass. If you were serious about home security, you would put bars on your windows and you wouldn’t have an entry point that could be bypassed with a few light blows from a hammer. You really don’t need to go overboard here, as the goal is to prevent easy break-ins. There are companies out there that will charge you an arm and a leg to put shatter-resistant film on your glass door. As I see it, the biggest benefit to this is that when someone breaks out your window it comes out in one piece and then the cleanup is easier.

As ever, we should not forget that that we all live in glass houses.

Obstacles

Another windstorm, another round of garage door lockouts. On one job a tree fell across my exit path and I had to get out my handsaw to lop off half of it and drag it from the road.

Help! I’ve lost my mailbox key!

I get several calls a week from people who’ve lost their mailbox keys. Often they’ve already called their local post office because they’re under the mistaken impression that someone over there might give a flying fish. Some post offices will tell you to call a locksmith. I’ve heard rumors that some other offices will say that you can wait two or three weeks and pay $50 or $60, and the post office will resolve the problem. And some local post offices don’t even pick up the phone.

Mailbox clusters sometimes belong to the neighborhood association and sometimes belong to the post office. The lock attached to your box belongs to you. You can do whatever you want with it. The letter carrier doesn’t have a key to your individual box. If your box is in a cluster, he has a key that opens up the entire column of boxes at once. Don’t ever mess with the mailman lock that opens all the boxes at once. If you have your own standalone mailbox with a slot at the top, the mailman can’t get into that at all; he just drops your letters through the slot.

If you want to resolve this yourself, the first hurdle is getting the box open. Go ahead and find a bobby pin, straighten it out, and then put it under your pillow and spend a night dreaming about picking locks. In the morning, you still won’t be able to use that bobby pin to open your mailbox. Don’t even waste your time. But I know from experience that if you catch the postman while he’s delivering the mail, there’s a fair chance he’ll help you take off your old lock while the box is open. Be ready with a pair of pliers. The lock will usually be affixed with a clip that’s wedged between the inside of the door and the lock. Yank the clip out and the lock will come loose. In rare instances, the lock is attached with a nut that needs to be spun off. Once that’s all done, it’s your job to replace the lock.

The majority of mailboxes are outfitted with a standard-sized hole that’s sort of elliptical. Any mailbox lock you buy should fit into that hole. Some boxes (especially the big black ones with Wind locks in them) are so heavily painted that you need to run a file through the inside edges of the hole to allow aftermarket locks to fit in them. In general it’s easy to pop a new lock in. You can get one at Home Depot for $7. The hard part is finding a cam that fits properly onto the lock and holds the door snugly closed. (The cam is the thing that secures and releases the door when you turn the key back and forth.) Unless you’re like me and have a bucket full of cams, your best bet is to buy an identical lock to the one you have so that you can transfer the old cam to the new lock.

Some newer mailboxes have a tugboat-shaped hole in them. These are for the newer post-office-approved locks, which are labeled “USPS-L-1172C”. Once when it was raining and I was feeling lazy I decided to drill one of these out. Forty-five minutes later, I swore I’d never do that again. More recently I broke my pick off inside of one and it got so badly jammed in there that picking the lock was no longer possible and I had to drill it out, after which I swore I’d try my hardest to avoid having to do that again. You can get these locks from a local locksmith shop for about $20 after tax. Be aware that about 60% of the time you’ll need to know whether the lock is supposed to turn clockwise or counter-clockwise. The new locks will fit into the old holes, but the reverse is not true.

Before you bother with any of this, check the trap in your washing machine. If the key isn’t there, try looking deep in the pockets of that jacket you don’t usually wear but may have thrown on that one time last week. If you really can’t find it and don’t want to take this project on yourself, feel free to give me a call.

Crawl Spaces and Empathy

This week I got called to a house in the Blue Ridge section of Seattle, an upscale neighborhood full of beautiful old houses with magnificent views of the sound. The customer arrived late. I disliked her the moment she stepped out of her Audi, with her purse dog. She was an older woman who didn’t bother to take off her Jackie O sunglasses when greeting me. She explained that the house was a rental and she had reason to believe there might be squatters inside. This is the type of thing I like to know before I arrive at a job. If there were people inside, she had no intention of flushing them out herself.

When we opened the front door, we were immediately hit with cigarette stench. There were butts and beer bottles scattered about. “Let’s see if there’s anyone here,” she told me, encouragingly. I should be paid more for this. Trepidatiously, I walked through the ground floor, opening doors and calling out, “Anyone here??” The toilets were unflushed and had cigarette butts floating in them. One downstairs closet had a trap door to the basement that was flipped open. It was clear that someone had entered through a crawl space. But by the looks of things, no one was in. I continued my calls as I walked up a narrow winding staircase. When I was halfway up, a female voice came from around the corner. “Yes, I’m in here.” I turned around and walked down the stairs and out the door to the client to tell her what I’d learned.

The client went in and walked to the bottom of the stairs, craned her neck, and said, “Miss, you need to leave.”

“Okay,” we heard back.

Then she turned to me and said, “What do I do now?”

“Call the police,” I said. I took out my screwdriver from my back pocket and walked over to the nearest deadbolt to get to work.

My client stood in the kitchen and had an overly loud conversation with the Seattle Police Department. I tried to gesture to her to walk outside with her phone. It was my desire that the police would arrive in time to arrest the intruder(s). I didn’t want her to alert them to the urgency of the situation. It didn’t matter, though. Upstairs I heard some rustling and something being sprayed out of an aerosol can. No one was making a run for it.

I was still working fifteen minutes later when a young woman came down. She was about 20, slightly plump, and had a cold sore. Her bosom was pushed up nearly to her chin, and was dangerously close to bursting out of the top of her shirt. She approached me, seemingly out of breath, and began a ramble. “It wasn’t me. A couple of my friends were staying here and I was just visiting–.” I cut her off with a shake of the head.

“Talk to that lady. I’m just the locksmith.” She went outside and I carried on.

When it seemed like I was finished I looked for the client to hand over the new keys. She filled me in on what I’d missed while I was working. She had told the squatter that a security firm would be watching the house, but that she would gather up her items and leave them on the curb in a bag. I was impressed by the woman’s generosity of spirit.The neighbors later told her that as many as four people had been seen going in and out of the house. Apparently they’d got their hands on the spare keys hanging from a nail in the garage. Also, packages had been disappearing from porches up and down the street.

Then she asked if I’d changed the lock on the door on the balcony. I always miss the door on the balcony. She ascended the stairs with me, wearing a pair of rubber kitchen gloves and shoveling men’s clothes into a bag as she went. The floor of the master bedroom was littered with used hypodermic needles. Both of us got to work–she at cleaning, and me at rekeying the last lock in the house.

“Do you think that if I gave them their clean needles, I’d be enabling them?” she asked, holding a trash bag in one hand and a sealed bag of new syringes in another.

“I think that whether or not you give them those needles, they’re still going to be junkies,” I told her.

“Oh, these wasted lives,” she said, sorrowfully.

My opinion of my customer had shifted. She made me feel guilty for not having more empathy for these thieving drug-addicted trespassers. And it stung a little that I was out-liberalled by this old lady (who didn’t, in reality, have a dog in her purse). But that’s a topic for another blog.

The lesson of the story is this: if you don’t want to have to wrestle with your own reactions to the tragic lives and trespassing ways of smack fiends, check to make sure your crawl space is secured.

Locksmith Hypocrisy

This afternoon I was scheduled to change some locks for a gentleman that a regular client sent my way. As a favor to my client, I’d agreed to do the job at a deeply discounted rate. I gathered from his accent that he was Brazilian.

At 12:20 I called him to confirm the 1:00 appointment we’d set earlier in the week.

-I’m just leaving the gym. Can we change to 1:30? he asked.

-No, I said. I’m on a schedule. We can either cancel or stick to the time we agreed upon.

-Okay, he said. I’ll see you at 1:00.

The next time we spoke was at 1:05.

-I’m here. Are you coming? I ask.

-I’m just five or ten minutes away.

-You should know that I’m going to charge you extra for being late.

-What?! You didn’t tell me that.

-You didn’t tell me you were going to be late.

He arrived at 1:22, looking happy and relaxed.

I raced through the job to make sure I’d be able to make my 2:00 lockout, finishing with tons of time to spare. As I wrote up the bill, I thought about the extra charge I was going to tack on, and how he probably had a less rigid conception of time. I remembered living in Mexico and often feeling like I was in a completely different dimension. Those Salvador Dali paintings with the clocks melted and hanging across barren tree branches come to mind. It occurred to me that this might be what someone who values buzz words over grammar would call a “teachable moment”.

I approached the customer with the bill.

-Look, I said, I’m not going to charge you for making me wait all that time, but I AM going to give you an earful.

-What’s an earful?

-I’m going to scold you.

Immediately his posture and facial expression changed to that of a petulant teenager as he braced himself for what was coming. I proceeded into schoolmarm mode. It went something like this:

-When you show up over 20 minutes late to our appointment, it’s very rude. While I’m wasting time sitting in my hot van waiting for you, I’m not earning money. You’re enjoying your Saturday going to the gym on my time. Do you think this is where I want to be on a Saturday? What you did was inconsiderate, it wasted a bunch of my time, and it might cost me some work. But even worse than all that is that it’s insulting. What you’re telling me by showing up late is that your time is more important than mine. You asked me here to help you with your problem and you didn’t think it was necessary to show me the basic courtesy of being here when I arrived.

At this point he cut in to explain something about getting stuck in traffic.

-You know, I said, sometimes it’s not enough to say to yourself, I hope that traffic will be alright and I’ll get there on time. Instead you have to plan for the possibility that traffic will be bad so you don’t need to use it as an excuse. Your excuses don’t make this less rude. You weren’t even going to call me to say you were coming late. Not everyone is going to tell you this as bluntly as I am, but everyone is going to be thinking it. Showing up late like that is rude.

It went on like this until I got it all out. In the end, he apologized. Then we settled up, talked about carpet cleaners, exchanged some pleasantries, and shook hands.

It was only when I got to my van that I saw the clock. I’d spent so much time scolding him that I was late for my 2:00 appointment.

Funny Lockout Call

The other night my phone rang at 12:30. Though I was in a deep sleep and in my jammies, I answered the phone on the second ring with pep in my voice. I enjoy late-night calls. This one was from a bartender in Duvall. She said a girl at the bar had lost her house keys and needed some locksmith help. I told her that I was pretty far away and that it could take me 45 minutes to arrive. Maybe she should try such-and-such locksmith closer to her location. That’s alright, she said. Mine was the dozenth number she’d called and I was the first to pick up. I quoted a price that was competitive but still commensurate with the task of rolling out of bed for a long drive in the middle of the night. This was followed by muffled voices. Okay, please come, she said.

I was a little apprehensive as I barreled down the mostly empty streets to Duvall, wondering what I was going to encounter. Drunk people can be…interesting. When I arrived at the bar about 40 minutes after we’d finished the call, the bartender immediately recognized me, probably because of my goatee. It’s not something I ever wore before I was a locksmith. I consider it part of my uniform. She pointed me toward the back of the bar where I’d find my customer.

She was easy enough to spot. The only person in that section of the bar was a middle-aged woman in the corner booth, reading a newspaper. She was around my mother’s age—old enough that she could be called comely, but not yet to the point that we could say she was handsome. I approached her table and gave a little wave. She looked up at me, giggled, shook her head, and tried to wave me away. I guess she thought she was out of my league. No, I’m David, your locksmith, I told her. Surprised and embarrassed, she folded up her paper and slid out of the booth.

She followed me out the door of the bar, walked toward my van, and asked if it was mine. When I confirmed that it was, she reached for the locked passenger side door and tried to open it. So it was clear now that she was expecting a ride to her house. I got more of the story once we were underway. She was not drunk. She’d locked herself out of her house and then trekked a mile and a half to the only place where she could use a phone and then sit inside for an hour in the middle of the night.

When we arrived at her house, she went directly into the open three-car garage and pointed at the service door. This is the one you need to open, she told me. Lots of times people try to tell me which specific door they expect me to open. I consider that to be my choice to make. Let me look around for an easier way in first, I say.

I began my routine tour of the outside of her house, searching for an open door or window. She gave me the routine assurances that there were none to be found. As I rounded the second corner of the house, she mumbled something about a bathroom window. I didn’t quite hear her. But when I got around to the final stretch of this lap around the house, I figured out what she was talking about. There was something I’d never run into on a lockout call: a shattered window. I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. We’d already discussed how her identification was locked inside the house and how I’d look at it as soon as we got inside.

Then she came clean, a little chagrinned. After she’d realized she was locked out, she took a hammer to the window, planning to crawl through it. This was sensible enough. It beats schlepping to a bar and waiting for a far-off locksmith to arrive. But once she saw all the jagged glass, she lost courage and decided to call for assistance.

I carefully reached through the hole in the window, unhooked the latch, and slid the window frame out of the way. From the garage, I got a doormat and a stepstool. I draped the rubber mat over the shards of glass littering the windowsill, climbed up on the stool, and slipped in through the little open window. (As a diminutive man who watches his carbs, I can often fit through spaces that are not designed for adult human passage.) Then I went through the house to open the garage door from the inside. We immediately went for her purse to look at her license and then settle up, whereupon I cut the nice lady a spare key to hide in her garage, and then set out on the long drive back to bed.

More on Double-Cylinder Deadbolts

I was called to a house this week to change the locks, and the homeowner had a double-cylinder lock on the door leading down into the basement. I’ve written before about the danger of having double-cylinder deadbolt locks on exterior doors. Because the basement had exterior doors, this one at the top of the stairs was considered an egress door and wasn’t supposed to have that kind of lock on it. Fire code and good sense forbid it. I told the homeowner I could replace her dangerous lock or not touch it at all, but that I wouldn’t rekey it and then put it back on her door. She didn’t like those options, so I came up with a different solution.

For the upstairs side of the door, I made a key that, once inserted, couldn’t be pulled out of the lock. It would turn the cylinder and throw or retract the bolt like a thumbturn would, but it just looked like a lock with a key in it. The good thing about this solution was that without having to buy a new lock, she could now secure that door and not ever have to worry about being locked into the house during a fire.

But there are several reasons that it wasn’t a great solution:

-It’s not as secure as a real single-cylinder deadbolt; leaving a key in the inside half of a double-cylinder deadbolt makes the lock susceptible to a certain kind of bypass. (I figured that this was not a big problem on the basement door in question, as an intruder would first have to get through an exterior door to reach that one.)

-Now that deadbolt has a key permanently sticking out of it. It’s kind of a hackneyed way of fixing a problem. I chose an Emtek key, which has a big bow that’s easier to grab than a regular key. Still, it’s makeshift and unprofessional. I’d do it in my own home but I shouldn’t have fixed a customer’s house up like that.

-I’m also worried about someone tripping and smashing his or head right on that key. It’s highly unlikely, but still possible. I wonder if I’d be to blame if that happened. I could get sued and lose my key stock, my 1997 Chevy Astro van, everything. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up nights.

Despite all my criticisms of this method, this is really a perfect solution for someone who 1) wants to convert a double-cylinder deadbolt to a single-cylinder deadbolt, 2) is very stingy, 3) isn’t terribly concerned about home security, 4) doesn’t care how things look, and 5) isn’t worried about having sharp objects protruding from walls and doors.

Here’s a photo of how I altered the key so it would become fixed in the double-cylinder deadbolt. Note how I squared off the fourth cut in this key. I removed all but one pin stack, but this would have worked just as well by modifying the existing key.

Lock Picking Woes

Many of my customers have seen me slide my hand into my front shirt pocket to dig around for one of the lock picks I always keep in there. Picking locks is an essential part of my job. I sometimes run into longtime locksmiths who say they aren’t that good at it and don’t even practice the skill. I know other guys who think locksmiths without this skill shouldn’t even consider themselves locksmiths. I learned the trade among a group of practitioners who crafted custom picks by hand to fit their needs and who were constantly working to sharpen their skills.

I’m a middling picker of locks, perhaps even a poor one. I’ve only been at this for about three years. Sometimes I worry that I’m lacking in certain gifts that facilitate the practice–that my senses aren’t as sharp as some other guys’, so I don’t detect as much of the feedback that the lock is giving off as the bits move around inside. My saving grace is that I practice and work hard to get better at it, and I focus these efforts on the most common locks around. As a result, when I show up to a domestic lockout, there’s a very strong chance that I can pick the lock in question. If I can’t, there are other ways of solving the problem (which I don’t like to talk about).

The other day I went to help a family gain access to their home after the lock on their front door failed. I did a quick spin around the outside of the house, trying to find the quickest way in. I spotted several potentially easy points of entry. The last door I found had two locks that I thought would be very simple to pick. I chose this entry point, even though there were other doors with just one lock, and windows that looked like they might be open. I fished out my picks, crouched down, and got to work. I started with the doorknob. I made it look like movie lock picking: pop, pop, click, pop, spin, and open. And then on to the deadbolt. This one put up a fight. I worked at it for a few minutes—so long, in fact, that one of the two guys who were watching me said that one of the other doors would likely be easier to pick because it was more often used. I’m a little sensitive about my picking skills. And this was the second time that day that someone made what I considered to be an unhelpful suggestion about my picking. Earlier, when I was working on the door of a Seattle condo, a neighbor passing me in the hall cheerily said, “You’re doing it the hard way. You should just bump it!” I bristle at being told how to do my job.

Maybe that explains my irritated response to this second comment. Without turning my head to look at him, I said, “Pick a lot of locks, do you?” Then I winced at my own bad manners. That’s not the way to talk to a customer. But now it was on. The customers had become impatient, and I had dug in my heels. In truth, I had just been thinking about trying one of those other doors, but now my pride was in the mix. In order to vindicate myself and justify my prickliness, I now HAD to open this one, and quickly. My brow started to sweat a little. This was not good. Imagine getting your blood drawn by a phlebotomist on her very first day. You should probably try not to tweak her nerves right before she sticks that needle in your arm. In the same way, it’s unwise to question the judgment or undermine the confidence of a locksmith who you’re depending upon to pick his way into your house.

My focus started to slip. I became increasingly aware of the two customers looming behind me. I started thinking about the clock. Where was I? Five minutes? Six minutes? This was frustrating. I got clumsy and dropped my tension tool. As I fumbled with it the customer asked again about trying the other door. I spun my head around and looked at him. Right behind him was an empty koi pond. I pictured myself standing up, walking over to him, pulling his shirt up over his head, and pushing him into it. I wondered if the irritation was showing on my face. My response was polite. “This kind of lock is usually easier for me than that other one. Let me keep trying here for a couple more minutes.” I turned back to the lock, lifted one pin into position, and felt the plug turn freely. I was in. I let my shoulders slump as a wave of relief washed over me. I looked at my phone for the time. It had taken me eight minutes to open both locks. That’s not good but it’s not terrible. Then I gathered up my tools and pushed the door open.