Lock Replacement & Installation in Danville

This page holds two different jobs. One is straightforward replacement, where a cylinder or a complete lock has worn past the point where repinning helps. The other is fitting a first deadbolt on a door that has never had one, and in Danville that is nearly always the same door: the one between the garage and the kitchen. It normally carries a passage latch and nothing else, and it stands behind a garage door that opens from a button in a car. On most properties here it is the weakest lock on the place, and it is also the cheapest one to put right.

Before either job, the door itself gets measured and watched, because on a wide solid leaf nothing can be assumed. Thickness, backset and cross bore are taken off your door rather than off the box. Then the door is closed slowly and the bolt is watched into its keeper. After thirty summers in this valley, a heavy entry leaf on three hinges does not land where it landed the day it was hung. About a quarter of an inch is the figure a technician will name from experience rather than off a gauge, and that much is enough to put the bolt on the lip of the strike instead of in the middle of the pocket.

This is why so much of what gets bought as a replacement lock turns out to be something else. Ten seconds settles it, and you can run the test before calling. Swing the door wide open so the frame is out of the argument entirely, then turn the key. A key that still fights you in open air is a worn or dirty cylinder, and that is a strip and a clean or a repin. A key that turns sweetly in open air and jams the second the door is shut is a healthy lock reporting a frame problem, and no new hardware will improve it. On the second one the strike shifts a few millimeters and the complaint disappears for a fraction of the price of a lock.

When the lock genuinely is finished, the new one goes onto a door that has been squared first. A strike relocated to where the bolt actually arrives. Hinge leaves shimmed, or the top corner of the leaf eased, where the door has dropped enough to need it. A box strike anchored to the stud. A bore widened where an older door was drilled for hardware nobody stocks anymore. Each of those is shown to you before a screw turns. You hear the make, the grade and the finish before the old lock comes off. Keys are cut at the van. The old hardware stays with you unless you would rather it went.

Fitted, with the hardware, replacement runs $139 to $359, and the $89 call-out sits within that rather than after it. A cylinder going into a bore that already suits it is the bottom of the range. A deadbolt on a door needing boring, a leaf that has to come back square first, a handleset, or two doors in one stop moves toward the top. Evening puts $55 inside the figure and overnight puts $95 inside it, so the low end reads $194 after 8pm. You throw the new bolt yourself with the door shut before the receipt is written. Ninety days on the labor.