Lock Rekeying in Martinez
$27 to $44 per cylinder. New pins go into the lock already hanging on the door, and every key cut before this afternoon stops working. Outside doors end up sharing one blade. The first cylinder carries the trip, so the ones after it land at the bottom of the range.
$27–$44 per cylinder
Typical price
18 min
Avg. arrival
24/7
Availability
Rekeying answers a question about keys rather than about locks. The hardware stays in the door, a fresh set of bottom pins goes into the plug, and from that afternoon the lock answers a key that did not exist in the morning and ignores every key handed out before it. Nothing about the door looks different afterward. What changed is the list of people who can walk in.
This town asks for it constantly. The center and the flats near the station rent heavily, so keys move between people all year round. A house comes out of one family after decades and nobody could count the copies cut in that time. A contractor finishes a bathroom and the key left under a pot has been under that pot since spring. None of it is dramatic. It is simply an unknown number, and repinning sets the number back to what is in your hand.
There is a fork here that other towns do not have, and it belongs on the call rather than at the door. A bronze case worked by a bit key has no pin stack in it to restack. It is a warded or lever lock, its profile is shared with thousands of doors, and blanks for it are sold openly. That lock is worth keeping and worth servicing, and it is not worth pretending it decides who comes in. Where the door only has to stay shut, it stays exactly as it is. Where it has to hold against somebody, the case is bored for a modern mortise cylinder, and that lands under lock replacement at $119 to $315. Everything else on the property, meaning the cylinders in back doors, side doors, garage doors and padlocks, repins in the ordinary way.
Each cylinder is $27 to $44, and the $89 call-out attaches to the visit and not to the lock, which is why doors after the first cost so little and why four exterior openings usually take under an hour. One limit gets said out loud instead of discovered later: a plug worn out of round takes new pins badly and then binds on a brand new key. Around here that is usually a gate or shed cylinder that has stood twenty winters within reach of the water. When that is what comes off your gate you hear it at the bench, and a replacement is priced against the published range rather than folded quietly into a total.
Then the superseded keys go into their own locks while you stand there and watch them do nothing. That is the proof, not the piece of paper.
Sixteen jobs, fourteen of them with a range and two quoted once the openings have been counted on site. What moves a figure inside its range here is what is actually in the door: a cast mortise case that comes apart, cleans up and goes back in takes the low end, while a case seized with a century of paint, or one that has to be replaced because a part inside it is broken beyond repair, takes the high one. Say what the key does when you turn it, and the range closes to a single number on the call.
- Daytime (7am–8pm)standard rates
- Evening (8pm–12am)+$45
- Overnight (12am–7am)+$85
FAQ
Lock Rekeying: quick answers
Escrow closed on a place downtown last week. Do we repin or replace?+
Repin, in nearly every case. It retires the keys held by the previous owner, the agent, the gardener and whoever else picked one up across the years, and it costs a fraction of new hardware. Replacement is the answer for a lock that has actually failed, not for a lock whose only problem is a long history.
Can the bit key on our front door be rekeyed?+
Not the way a pin cylinder is, and anybody saying otherwise is selling you something. A warded or lever case has no pin stack to restack, and blanks for that profile are easy to come by. It can be cleaned, adjusted, kept and given a spare key. If you want that door to control access rather than simply latch, the case is bored for a mortise cylinder, and from then on it repins like anything else.
A unit near the station changes hands on Saturday. Can it be done that morning?+
It can, and Saturday mornings before 8pm carry no addition. Book it for after the cleaners are out. Every exterior cylinder on that unit comes onto a key of its own, you receive two for the incoming tenant and one for the office ring, and the paperwork sets the doors out beneath the unit number for your file.
Related
More residential services
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say whether the key meets a keyhole or a cylinder, and the rest of the call is quick
Martinez and the towns around the strait, around the clock. What sits in the edge of the leaf decides the work and the work decides the number, which is settled on the phone with the $89 visit and any late hour already inside it. It reads the same on the receipt. Ninety days on the labor, a rebuilt bronze case covered the same as a new lock.