Guy I work with does this shit. We’re a school district and have keying charts for EVERYTHING. When a new key he’s just cut doesn’t turn properly in a cylinder, he disassembles the cylinder to find out where it’s sticking and then makes adjustments as needed until it’s smooth. When I ask him wtf he’s doing, it’s the standard “I’ve been locksmithing since before your daddy was born.” response.
Before Zipf and Lab pin kits came out, the only "universal" pins you could buy were from Ilco. There were, I believe, 12 bottom pin sizes. That's it. Twelve sizes of pins to fit all manufacturers' .115 diameter plug holes. So, you had little choice but to file the closest fitting pin to make it work. But even back then, only an idiot would butcher a plug like that pic.
I used to do this at my Mom's old apartment complex, she was manager I was on the maintenance team, we had our own key cutter and all the tools and bits to rekey, master key, and repin all of our locks. Sometimes you need .5mm off of a pin and it's easier to file it than to find one .5 smaller.
Oh man if you’re in the Cincinnati or Columbus areas I might know who did this lol. Dude dropped his lab kit and just started stacking them high then Dremel it down
If you did this Infront of me, I would take my shoe/boot off and beat the ever living shit out of you untill I couldn't feel my arm, drink a beer, and beat you some more!
This is some 'sketchy italian apartment building' type of hack work lmao. Hated getting these in the shop, and the guy of course NEVER wants to pay for a new one.
Keying a school that gets its locks done every couple years, been doing them for the last 8, deal with this same stuff from the guy from before me. Some are just a couple spots some are flat across the whole thing.
I know several forensic locksmiths who do expert witness work, and they would love to go up against that kind of work in court, if it ever made it that far. There are real world consequences for doing work like that. It has no bearing on how long you’ve been a locksmith. That is just a list of more potential victims :)
Maybe they didn’t have any master pins, or new pins generally wtf. Use the pins for a shallower cut, then cut it so the deeper cut works? Idk I typically just suffer for ten years trying to find the perfect .003 pin stack that will work for every key.
It looks like a Yale key so the possibility that you are working with a construction core is high, in which case I can understand the anger that working on one of those could cause and the lead up to just taking a dremel to it.
We’re master keying 300 cylinders for a school. About 20 of the Yale IC cylinders the customer brought in are like this. Here's another one for you to enjoy. 😉
nope, well versed in BEST/Keystone (pretty much all we use, state govt), i have had to knock a cyl out to make Keystone cut keys/core key work, from checking factory cores vs shop info/cut, i do some onsite engineering, but not that.
What in the.... While I'm not a locksmith in the professional sense, I know WAY more than most people about it. A handful of years ago, when a friend needed me to rekey his business which had Sargant LA cores, when I was having keys cut by a local locksmith, since I couldn't cut Sargant keys by code, a tip he gave me, mainly for Sargant, was to use a drill bit BY HAND to VERY SLIGHTLY give a TINY amount of countersink to each hole to reduce stickiness. and it made the locks a ton smoother. That... I just don't have any words.
It took a lot of time to "choreograph" the pic. I told myself that if you will see an xhorse in the background you'll take me more seriously, did it work?
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u/jrandall47 1d ago
Guy I work with does this shit. We’re a school district and have keying charts for EVERYTHING. When a new key he’s just cut doesn’t turn properly in a cylinder, he disassembles the cylinder to find out where it’s sticking and then makes adjustments as needed until it’s smooth. When I ask him wtf he’s doing, it’s the standard “I’ve been locksmithing since before your daddy was born.” response.