Lock installation and lock repair across San Diego

Usually not. In most cases the cylinder is doing its job and the latch or the deadbolt is being fouled by the frame — a dropped hinge, a swollen door, a strike plate that has shifted, or a bolt no longer lined up with its hole.

That is a repair and an adjustment, not a new lock. Stop forcing the key while it is stiff: a key snapped in a bound cylinder turns a small alignment job into an extraction. Our guide on a key that turns but will not open the door walks through it.

The grading scale — Grade 1, 2 and 3 — is a durability and strength standard, with Grade 1 the heaviest. Grade 1 is built for commercial traffic; on a front door at home, a good Grade 2 deadbolt properly installed usually outperforms a Grade 1 fitted badly.

Installation is the part that decides the outcome. A strong bolt in a soft frame is a strong bolt in a soft frame.

Three things, and only one of them is the lock. The bolt has to throw far enough into the frame to matter. The strike plate has to be a proper reinforced one, not the thin pressed plate that came in the box. And the screws holding that strike have to be long enough to reach the structural stud behind the door frame rather than just the trim.

Most forced residential doors do not fail at the lock. They fail at the jamb, where three-quarter-inch screws let go of a strip of pine.

Yes. A new installation means boring the door correctly for the lock, cutting the mortise for the latch face, fitting and aligning the strike, and checking the door closes and locks freely through its whole swing.

Doors that have swollen, dropped or been painted around the edges often need work on the frame as well, and we would rather say that up front than fit a lock that binds from day one.

Stop putting oil in it. Household oil and general-purpose spray lubricants attract dust, and a cylinder full of oily grit gets steadily worse until it seizes on a key and snaps it.

A stiff cylinder is usually worn pins, a worn key, or debris. It is a clean, a service or a cylinder swap — a short job if it happens before the key breaks.

A great many locks are repairable: latches, springs, cams, tailpieces, strikes, closers and alignment are all serviceable. What is not worth repairing is hardware that has been forced, badly corroded, or built so lightly that the repair will not hold.

We tell you which of those you have, at the door, before we start.

Yes. A high security cylinder resists picking, drilling and bumping, and its keys can only be cut on controlled blanks, so nobody duplicates your key without your say-so.

It earns its place on a street-facing door, a door out of sight of neighbours, or a property where a key went missing and never turned up. On an interior door it is money you do not need to spend.

Yes — sliding patio door locks and secondary security, gate and side-entry hardware, and the narrow-stile hookbolts and deadlatches used on aluminium storefronts. Storefront and commercial hardware is covered on our commercial locksmith page.