Lock Rekeying in Danville

Rekeying is the cheapest useful thing anyone does to a door. The lock never leaves the house. It takes a new set of bottom pins, after which it answers one new key and ignores every key handed out before today. Same hardware, same finish. The only thing that changes is the list of people who can get in.

The usual reason here is a purchase. A house in Danville changes hands with an unknown number of keys in circulation: the previous owners, their parents, an agent, a gardener, a pool service, a neighbor who watered plants one August. None of it is sinister and none of it is worth losing sleep over. It is simply an unknown, and a repin sets the count back to the keys in your hand. The first month in a new house is the right time, and the list runs shorter than people expect: the front door, the door from the garage into the house, the side gate to the yard, and whichever back door actually gets used.

One key for all of them is the part households notice. Where the keyways agree, the front door, the garage service door, the back door and a gate padlock all come onto a single blade, which ends the business of sorting through a ring in the dark with an armful of groceries. Brass from the seventies and eighties is generally worth keeping and repins at the van bench in about the time a kettle takes.

While the cylinders are out, the doors get looked at, and that is where a good share of these visits earns its money. A key that has needed force since June is very often not a pinning problem at all. The leaf has grown, the bolt is dragging on the edge of its keeper, and fresh pins will not touch that. Moving the strike to where the bolt lands now takes a few minutes and belongs to the visit rather than to a purchase. It is worth saying aloud, because the alternative is paying for a repin and still shouldering the door in August.

Rekeying is $31 to $49 per cylinder, and the $89 call-out is counted once for the stop, not once per lock. Four cylinders on one visit is a short hour. One limit is worth stating plainly. A plug worn out of round cannot be usefully repinned, and the usual candidate is a gate cylinder that has stood outdoors through twenty summers. Put fresh pins in a worn plug and you own a lock that binds on a key cut this morning. If that is what is on your gate you hear it at the bench, and a replacement is priced against the published $139 to $359 rather than folded in quietly. Your old keys go into each lock while you watch and turn nothing. That is the proof. The receipt is only paperwork.