Buying new locks for a door can be expensive, so it is advised that you simply rekey your locks. Better yet, learn how to rekey your own locks so that you can save yourself the time and cost of getting locks rekeyed by a professional.
How to Rekey a Lock
You can buy a rekey toolkit for around $10 in a utility store, such as a Home Depot. Rekey toolkits exist for most popular brands — if you have a lock that is pretty old or is custom-made/foreign, consult a professional instead of reading this guide.
Buying a toolkit is a good investment because it is designed for a brand of lock and can be used multiple times (depending on the number of the pins that came with the toolkit). Most toolkits can be used around six times.
First, remove the knob of the door that you want to rekey. To remove the doorknob, insert a metal wire into the side of the knob, depress the knob, and pull it off. Then push the lock cylinder out from the knob by pushing it out after popping off the knob sleeve.
There is a retainer ring on the cylinder that secures the contents of the lock cylinder. Push the retainer tool against the proper slot of the retainer ring to remove it. If you don’t know the proper slot, refer to the instruction manual that came attached with the toolkit.
Remove the cylinder plug from the cylinder. The cylinder plug houses all the small pins that come down on the key to make sure the key is a match before unlocking. Once the cylinder plug is out of the cylinder, you can replace these small pins with the pins that came when you bought the toolkit.
Replace the color-coded pins to match your new key (that also came with the new toolkit). Then carefully put everything back and it should be set. Test the lock (without actually locking the door at the frame) to test if the key works. If it doesn’t work, take it apart to see what went wrong and fix the problem.
Additional Help
If you feel like you need professional help on figuring out the cost of getting locks rekeyed, TalkLocal can put you on the phone with the correct local experts in minutes.
You ought to take part in a contest for one of the most useful blogs on the web. I am going to recommend this blog!
This is a very good tip particularly to those fresh to the blogosphere. Brief but very accurate info… Thank you for sharing this one. A must read article!