Tools of the Trade: The Georgia Locksmith’s Paraphernalia, Part II

In ‘Tools of the Trade: The Georgia Locksmith’s Paraphernalia’, we took a look at the most basic tools of the locksmith’s trade: the lockpicking tools. Today, we’re going to take a look at the tools that Georgia locksmiths use to create keys of various types.

Basic Tools, Take II

Making Physical Keys

• Key Cutter: This is the round, spinning grinder that you see at the hardware store. It’s used to turn key blanks (below) into completed keys by grinding them down until their profile matches the one the pins inside the lock require in order to allow the lock to open.
• Key Blanks: Simply a key with no profile etched into it — but there’s more than that. Every kind of lock has it’s own notching — the ‘zig-zag’ you can see when you look at a key long-ways down its shaft. This leads to the need for a locksmith to carry hundreds of different kinds of key blank.
• Key Decoder: Nothing at all like a decoder key, a key decoder is an implement that a locksmith can put into a lock that comes out with the necessary profile to cut a new key for that lock, having ‘learned’ it by being put inside.

Making (and Repairing) Physical Locks
Creating locks is a complex enough process that a comprehensive list of the tools you need would take several more entries, so we’ll just give a brief summary of the tools that your typical Smyrna locksmith would use on a regular basis.

• Pinning Kit: Consisting of lots of pins, a pin tray, and several pin code books from various lock manufactories, a pinning kits contain everything a locksmith needs to get a disassembled lock into a fully-functional state.
• Lock-and-safe Scope: A lock-and-safe scope is two bits of fiber-optic wire: one carries light from an LED and shines it into the lock (or safe); the other lets you see inside using the light carried by the first. Lock-and-safe scopes are vital in determining what is broken inside of a nonfunctional lock.
• Cylinder Removal Tools: The critical component for removing a lock from it’s door without destroying the architecture, a cylinder removal tool can take an (unlocked) lock out of it’s housing so it can be repaired.

Of course, this doesn’t even begin to get into all of the tools necessary should a locksmith start dealing with electronic locks and all of the details associated with them. Maybe someday we’ll put a Part III in here and discuss those.

Tools of the Trade: The Georgia Locksmith’s Paraphernalia

It takes a LOT of equipment to be a fully-decked-out locksmith. In Decatur, for example, there are only a few truly all-purpose locksmiths. Most shops have the basics, but very few can handle everything from car-key lockins to major corporate clients who need multiple levels of master-key to give different people different levels of overlapping access without the need to carry a massive ring of keys around at all times.

The Basics
Every Georgia locksmith simply has to have the following equipment:

Lockpicking Tools

• Plug spinner: An interesting tool that allows you to take a lock that you’ve picked into the ‘locked’ position, and ‘flip’ it into the unlocked position. A plug spinner can’t do anything for you if you don’t already know the position of the locks’ internals, but if you can get in it and just can’t get it unto the unlocked position, this baby will do it for you.
• Electronic pick: Electronic picks look like small machines with a keylike extension. They’re high-end tools used to pick complex systems like combination locks that have a key set feature.
• Tension wrench: Also (and more correctly) called a torsion wrench, this tool is what locksmiths use to turn a lock once they’ve picked it. It’s important because different kinds of locks require different levels of pressure to turn properly without causing backup safety measures to engage.
• Lockpick Gun: Essentially a non-computerized, more mobile, and much less expensive version of an electronic pick, a lockpick gun can be inserted into most standard locks and simply hits all of the pins in all possible combinations until it finds the one that will unlock the door.
• Key Remover: This simple device is a minute little claw that can reach inside of a keyhole and remove any broken key pieces or anything else that might be blocking the hole and preventing a key or pick from working properly.

Wow, we’ve run out of space and we’re just getting started here. It looks like we’ll have to come back for a “Tools of the Trade: The Georgia Locksmith’s Paraphernalia, Part II”!

Keys Locked In Your Car? Find A Kennesaw Locksmith In No Time Flat

Every adult in Lawrenceville has been there: you reach into your pocket to grab the keys to open up your PO box, and they’re not there. You panic, and you run back to your car…and they’re there. Inside. And the door is locked. You immediately start to panic, with frantic thoughts of wire hangers drifting aimlessly through your suddenly-foggy brain. Why didn’t you buy yourself a slim-jim last Christmas like your brother suggested? Well, for one thing, where would you put it? Right: inside your car. Useless.

So you reach for your cellphone and you call yourself a Kennesaw locksmith. The guy who has a slim-jim, but more importantly, probably doesn’t have to use it. The guy — or gal! — who not only can make a new key for your car, but probably has the chutzpah and smarts to fake up a transponder key that can unlock your car electronically so you don’t actually need a new key for your car.

Of course, ideally, you’d already have the contact information for a skilled locksmith. Kennesaw certainly isn’t lacking in options. A bit of research ahead of time, and you could call with confidence knowing that your man — or woman! — would be there promptly and with the tools needed to get your car open.

But if you happen to be the kind of person who doesn’t have weeks on end to spend researching every single emergency phone number you might ever need and program them into your cellphone, you’ll need to find such a locksmith on the fly, and in a hurry. How do you do that? Well, you could certainly call 411 and ask the Information lady, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll end up with a quality locksmith if you take the blind route.

What you’ll want to do is remember the three basic questions that separate out the shady locksmiths from the quality ones. “Are you bonded?”, “With whom are you licensed?” and “Are you available right now?” The last one is the most important, but don’t work with anyone that isn’t bonded and licensed with an official organization like the Associated Locksmiths of America. Remember those simple things, and between them and the 411 lady — or guy! — you’ll get your keys back in no time flat.

Robbers’ Worst Enemies: The Locksmiths in Marietta GA

Crime is always a concern, especially in quiet suburban America. That’s where criminals most like to strike; the neighbors are often loathe to assume something is wrong, and the houses generally have some decent saleable items without being terribly secure. Homeowners are generally not that worried about crime, thinking “it won’t happen to me” until it’s too late.

The most awful part about the entire scenario is how easy it is to fend off the average burglar. Unless they have a very specific reason to be targeting you, burglars would far sooner move on to easier prey than deal with even a single annoying obstacle in their path. There are always plenty of poorly-defended homes down the road. Much like the old joke about running from a tiger — you don’t have to run faster than the tiger, you just have to run faster than the slowest person that’s running from the tiger.

The Role of the Locksmith
That makes the locksmiths in Marietta GA — or any other suburb around Atlanta, really — a great ally to have in the fight against crime. Modern locksmiths aren’t just people who can get your keys out of your car, after all: they’re virtually experts in building security. They can assess the various portals into your home, find which ones have locks that are easy to pick (or break), and which ones are vulnerable in other ways.

New Homes
When a company is building a new home, the security details are almost entirely afterthoughts, and they’re scatter-brained. One contractor will put in outdoor lighting, another will (possibly) put in an alarm system, and a third — generally a carpenter — will put in some low-grade locks on the doors. Security essentials like floor safes, reinforced doors, and deadbolts deep enough that they can’t be simply kicked out of the wall, well, those are the new homeowner’s concern. That’s why every time you buy a new home, you should immediately call in a locksmith to check on the quality of your home’s defenses.

The locksmiths in

A Brief History of Lockmiths: Atlanta, GA to Atlanta, Greece Part II

In “A Brief History of Lockmiths: Atlanta, GA to Atlanta, Greece” part I, we talked about the early development of locks, from prehistory until the Industrial Revolution. That’s when locks really came into their own as a technology, and a lot of fascinating developments occurred in the industry of locksmithing.

But first, a brief step backwards — because there was a fork in the history of lock making that happened in the 14th-17th centuries. This was a time during which the thrills of clockwork and of ‘machine puzzles’ were being uncovered by the likes of Da Vinci and his peers and successors. These went on to become modern combination locks — the first locks to work on information rather on physical keys, and the earliest ancestors of our modern fingerprint and retinal scanners.

OK, back to the modern lock. As time moved forward, locks became more and more challenging to pick as the keyholes became smaller, the joint between tumbler and bolt more secure, and key carving more intricate. As the physical demands of creating a modern lock became more and more complex, locksmiths shifted from being the people who created locks to being the people who repaired and replaced locks.

There are still locksmiths in Atlanta — the one in Georgia this time — that can and do build their own locks and keys, but they are few and far between these days. By far and away, however, a modern locksmith’s most common job has nothing to do with creating locks, and much more to do with how and where to USE locks.

A modern locksmith is half-expert in physical security, able to talk intelligently about the security threats to your average retail location or large home as well as being able to craft a key, fix a broken lock, or get you into your car in a heartbeat if you’ve locked your keys inside. No longer are locksmiths creative craftsmen who turn lumps of iron into effective forms of security, but they are nonetheless still artists as well as craftsmen — just of a different kind.

A Brief History of Lockmiths: Atlanta, GA to Atlanta, Greece

Locks — simple-enough sounding mechanisms designed to keep doors, chests, cabinets, suitcases, and other storage devices and facilities from opening up and revealing their contents to anyone unless they had the key. In ancient times, the key was invariably a physical object that had to be inserted into the lock in order to work. Modern keys are just as often a piece of information — like the combination to a vault lock — or a piece of your own body, such as in a retina scanner.

Locksmiths have changed over the millennia just as much as locks have. The first locksmiths were literally smiths — they forged locks out of iron, with hammers and anvils and heat. (In fact, the word smith and the word smite — as in, to hit — have the same root in old English, “smitan“.)

The oldest locks were made of wood, and used wooden pins and wooden keys, but they fell out of style in the age of Cleopatra, when Greek people took the concept, brought it home, and started doing the same thing with metal. locksmiths in Atlanta — the one that used to exist, in ancient Greece — forged some of the earliest locks that we would recognize as such today.

The Romans took over shortly thereafter and made locks more difficult to open by adding ‘warding’ — shaped metal sections that prevented people from putting the wrong key into the lock. Over centuries, warding evolved into the now-familiar notching of keys that we still use today. After the fall of Rome and the subsequent Dark Ages, locks remained static for nearly a thousand years, until the Industrial Revolution.

That’s when a clever British man named Robert Baron invented the double-tumbler lock, which is the basis of all modern locks that use keys. In these locks, the bolt is locked into place by a variety of different-length levers or tumblers, and only the correctly-shaped key will move all of the levers or tumblers into precisely the right height to allow the bolt to move.

That brings us into the era of modern locks, which is rich and complex enough to deserve it’s own article. Looks like we’ll need an ‘A Brief History of Lockmiths: Atlanta, GA to Atlanta, Greece’ Part II!

How To Know You Can Trust A Locksmith From Atlanta GA

There aren’t any laws at the federal level that require American locksmiths to have any form of training, certification, or other validation that they know how to do their jobs. In fact, only thirteen states have any such thing, either — and Georgia isn’t one of them. So how do you know that you can trust a locksmith from Atlanta, GA?

Well, as it turns out, there are a few different ways.

Bonding
The first is that Georgia does requires it’s locksmiths to be bonded to the tune of $25,000. So the first thing you should ask anyone claiming to be one — from an Alpharetta locksmith to a Woodstock locksmith — for is proof that they’re bonded.

For those of you that don’t know, bonding is like of like car insurance — it’s basically a form of insurance that says “if I do something in the course of my job that hurts one of my clients, this insurance will pay to have it fixed.” Working with any form of contractor that isn’t bonded is a bad job, but with a locksmith it’s particularly important, because a locksmith is in a particularly powerful position in terms of allowing other people to get into your home.

The AOLA
The Associated Locksmiths of America is an organization that is devoted to offering a non-governmental way of affirming that a given locksmithery is a quality operation. They provide their own independent licensing system, and it’s not just a “pay us for your certification” mill like so many places these days are. You actually have you prove your stuff and if you have any complaints of ethical violations, they’ll drop you like you’re hot. In the bad way.

The BBB
The Better Business Bureau keeps records of each business in every major trade area in the USA, and they only put their seal of approval on businesses that ask for it, earn it, and then never receive a complaint. A locksmith with the BBB seal is one that you can almost certainly trust.

Word of Mouth
Probably the best way to find a locksmith you can trust, of course, is to ask someone you know who has had a good experience with one. Not only will you end up with a locksmith you can trust, but one that will probably treat you well as well.

Atlanta Locksmiths Are Crucial To Your Home Security

Home security is one of those issues that you either don’t pay any attention to at all — because you’ve never had a loved one that got robbed — or that you’re inclined to observe with a more than modicum of scrupulousness. Each year, more than a billion dollars of property is lost to robbery every year — not to mention thousands of lives to burglaries gone awry. That’s why Atlanta locksmiths have dedicated themselves to making sure that the only people who can get into your house are the ones who belong there.

There’s an old saying, “Locks just keep an honest man honest.” And to a degree, it’s true: if someone is truly dedicated at breaking into your home whatever the cost, they will get in. But burglars and robbers aren’t that dedicated. They’re looking for an easy score — they’ll drop the idea of hitting your house the instant they realize that it’s not going to be as easy as they’d like. To that end, a high-quality lock on each door and window goes a long way toward keeping the wrong people out.

What a lot of people don’t realize, however, is that there are a LOT of low-quality locks out there. If you allow your building contractor to redo your locks when you renovate your front room, you can be almost guaranteed that he’s not going to install the same locks that a Georgia locksmith would. (Ask yourself this: would you let your locksmith design your new front room? Why not? –Then why would you let the contractor put in your locks?)

A decent locksmith will also help you go over your home and find places where the locks are most vulnerable. Often, for example, the door between your garage and the rest of your home is highly vulnerable, and burglars who figure out a way into your garage (which is surprisingly easy) then have an easy way to get to all of your valuables. There are a startling number of ways into your average home, but a solid Atlanta locksmith can — and will be happy to — help you protect them all.

Coming Soon

More articles coming soon.