Flashes of Panic

There’s something about the door to this house that eats deadbolts. Maybe it’s just our luck. The puzzle, though, is that there are two deadbolts, and it is the owner’s wish that they use the same key.

The deadbolt in the door when we first moved in reached End Of Life not long after we arrived; I found myself clamping two chunks of a hockey stick (used for propping windows on the porch) around my key to get enough leverage to move it. Rather than wait on the owner (long story) I just bought a (relatively cheap) deadbolt and replaced it. Then I realized we would need another one, keyed the same way, and I had to find another one. This failed and I ended up having another one re-keyed to match.

This worked fine for a while, but recently A locked the door on the way out and found she couldn’t remove her key. It turned out that the tailpiece of the new lock had snapped off, killing that lock.

If you’re keeping score, that’s two non-working locks and two working locks, with two sets of keys; each set of keys works on one working lock and a non-working lock.

The temporary measure was to bring the older working lock up from the basement and rearrange the locks so the doors weren’t keyed-alike, but at least had working locks. Last week I happened on a pair of keyed-alike deadbolts, the brand of the original locks, and snapped them up in a second. When I got them home, I realized that these locks were keyed both sides, not keyed on one side and latch on the other.

(I’m not sure when one would use a lock like this. When is it important for a door to be locked to people on both sides? Particularly if a person on the “inner” side with a screwdriver could remove the lock entirely?)

I looked to see if I could just swap the old latch plates with the inner cylinders, but the tailpieces didn’t match up. Fortunately for me, I had the internet in my toolbox. Two searches produced, first, the manufacturer’s manual for re-keying these locks, including an illustration describing how to remove the tailpieces with a special tool.

(That also taught me that those pieces are called “tailpieces”, and also how the locks themselves worked. I briefly considered re-keying the locks to work with the key to my parents’ house, but thought better of it. I actually took apart the cylinder mechanism of one of the old locks and put it together again so it worked; I’m tempted, now, to try to clean out the frozen one and bring it back into working order.)

Second, a lock-picking site (yes, there are lock-picking sites) describing how to remove tailpieces without the special tool, or at least confirming that it was possible, and I was in business. I put the tailpieces of the original locks on the outer cylinders of my newest locks, and then used otherwise original equipment all around. And I know about three times as much about deadbolts than I did this morning.