Lock Rekeying in Palo Alto

Locks are rarely the problem; keys are. A rekey changes the keys and leaves the locks, and Palo Alto produces the need for one every week. A landlord in College Terrace turns a house over between one set of students and the next. An Old Palo Alto house closes escrow after forty years, and nobody knows how many gardeners, painters and housekeepers still carry a copy. A Crescent Park owner changes property managers and would rather not ask for the old ring back. A faculty rental near campus comes home from a sabbatical year of subletting. Tall Tree Lock & Safe repins the cylinders already in your doors. The old keys stop turning and nothing on the door looks any different.

Here is where a locksmith earns the word over a drill. The original mortise cylinders in Professorville and Old Palo Alto are kept and repinned, not drilled out and replaced with something from a blister pack, as long as the plug still turns without catching; if it catches, you hear that on the bench and not after. On the bench in the van the plug slides out on a follower, the old bottom pins are dropped into a cup, and a fresh set is loaded to a key that has never existed before. A Kwikset or a Schlage from an Eichler or a downtown condo is done in the time it takes to make coffee. Mailbox locks are swapped instead, because most of them come with their pins fixed at the factory. Keys are cut at the van. When the cylinders are back in the doors, you hand over the old keys and watch each one fail in each lock; that is the proof, not the receipt.

Rekeying is $27 to $45 per cylinder, and the $89 visit is inside the total. A house with four cylinders comes to $108 to $180; a deadbolt and a knob on a one-bedroom near campus, $54 to $90. Since the $89 visit is the floor, a pair of cylinders at $27 does not come to $54; it comes to $89, and that is the whole figure for the visit. When a door carries a cylinder in a keyway the others cannot share, you hear on the call that it will either keep its own key or be swapped under lock replacement.

You call and describe the doors: how many, or a photograph of each lock face. The figure per cylinder and the total are said on the call. The van leaves Midtown, and a text names the technician and the window. At the door the count is confirmed, the cylinders go to the bench and come back, keys are cut, the old keys are tried and fail, and the receipt repeats the figure. Landlords and property managers get the receipt laid out door by door under each unit, ready for the turnover file.