• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Keys for old locks

AJB Temple

AJB Temple

Sequoia
Joined
Apr 15, 2019
Messages
7,568
Reaction score
1,073
I have a two part Georgian chest and top cupboard that I have not long ago acquired. I did some work on it today. It's a Gillows original (both stamped and plated) and my specific issue is I don't have keys for any of the locks. Does anyone have any experience of sourcing good quality barrel locks and fitting them to old locks. I am perfectly happy to hand file a key from a barrel key blank if that is realistic.

This cabinet has 4 locks. I would surmise that the keys are all the same, though the drawer locks and cupboard locks are slightly different. The drawer locks are all stamped or engraved Gillow, whereas the cupboard lock is the only one with a bulge and has no markings that I can see. This is the cupboard lock. The pin is about 3mm (imperial endnote measured it yet).

IMG_1502.jpeg

IMG_1501.jpeg

The bulge in the back probably hides a cam and I doubt if the lever mechanism is at all complicated. Unfortunately this one is riveted so to open it I will have to either do a bit of hammer and drift punch work or failing that, drill it off. The keep also needs replacing on this one. I might have to make that. Someone has very carefully filled in the keep cutaways with what appears to be boxwood.

I imagine some of you will have re-keyed locks? Any tips for making this job as easy as possible? I want to learn to do this myself rather than take it to a locksmith, as I have a few locks here and there of similar old type.

Adrian
 
Quite likely to be be 3 lever, maybe 4.
Pretty easy to make your own key for, once you know the bitting but obviously harder to work out without taking the lock apart. No use taking it to a locksmith, they wont have the tools to figure it out.
Plenty of articles on how to do it yourself though if you do a google.

Might need to take a few measurements to find a suitable blank,or worse have one made. Mainly the bore of the shaft.
 
Thanks. I shall have to try harder with Google then. I was thinking about buying a job lot of old keys from the bay. I'll measure the shaft and slot dimensions tomorrow.
 
I had a similar problem with a lock on a microscope case, local locksmiths were unable to source a blank. I ended up going through a massive draw of old keys in a local junk shop until i found several that fitted , gave these to the locksmith who did the job for nothing, they were only too happy to bring an old lock back to life.
 
Obviously you want to keep the Gillows original locks, once you have managed to get in them I can’t imagine it will be too difficult to work out the shape of the key to fit, these were never very complicated locks, as you say it’s just getting the right sized blanks which I would’ve thought locksmiths would have for you to play with. Last time I had a cabinet lock like this copied it was 10 years ago and it wasn’t a problem. Ian
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top