WWW.ALOA.ORG JANUARY 2024 KEYNOTES 55 shown me the door already, I’d ask them to take me to it so I can check the opera- tion and figure out the issue. Now I know what I’m dealing with. The next step is to offer possible solu- tions to the problem. Most of the time, there’s only one answer and it’s fairly ob- vious, but sometimes it’s more complicat- ed. I’ll give you a real-life example that I ran into lately at the college. The issue was an existing panic device with a built-in alarm on an exit door to the street. The alarm was not going off when the touch bar was depressed, and changing the batteries didn’t help. I sus- pected a circuit board could have failed or there was a mechanical issue with trigger- ing the alarm. The bar itself worked fine. I had the security guy (a retired police officer) and the life safety/fire marshal (a retired firefighter) on the phone. I told them we could try to troubleshoot the bar and order a replacement board if it was available, which would be tedious. We could replace the entire bar, which would be expensive. The last option was to leave the bar as is and install a DETEX EAX-500 on the door. We decided on the DETEX, as it was the simplest and most cost-effective so- lution. That decision had a lot to do with the fact that the EAX-500s are all over the campus already. The maintenance guys and security officers are familiar with them. The point I’m making is that I gave them viable options and let them decide. Of course, I stressed what I thought the solution should be. A residential example of options would be a broken deadbolt. One option could be to replace the deadbolt with the same lock and key to the existing knob. Anoth- er would be to replace the deadbolt and key the knob to the new key. And another, in the case of cheap existing hardware, would be to upgrade to better hardware. The key to all of this is to educate the Figure 7 Figure 8 customers, particularly residential ones, about each option. “An educated consum- er is our best customer” was the slogan of a clothing company for many years, and it equally applies to our trade. By doing so, you’ll avoid callbacks — and when you’re done with your install/repair, make sure to have the customer try the locks before you leave. With commercial locations such as large apartment buildings, institutions and everything else, there’s likely to be a lot less explaining to do. This is because the maintenance people, management companies, building superintendents and so on usually tend to know their hard- ware. If they ask your opinion and you think they need to upgrade to new or dif- ferent hardware, that’s where you’ll need to educate them. For the newbies, you’ll notice if you keep your customers informed and take care of their issues that the level of trust they have in you will increase exponentially. A case in point: I did the common-area doors for about a dozen buildings being built in Hoboken, NJ, during a building boom in the 90s. The big boss told me to keep a set of keys for every one of them I worked on. One time, he asked me to rekey a small old building he was using as a field office. When I was done and handed him the keys, he said, “Make sure you put a key for this building on your key ring.” That’s the level of trust you want to have with your regular customers. I’m Shooting Up a Flare Figures 1-6 are pictures of a very old Eagle lock I removed from an electrical panel at the college recently. During the holiday break, I’m trying to do some of the stuff I haven’t had time to do, and a lot of that deals with securing electrical panels. I took this off a panel in a “performance space” in which everything was painted black, including the panel locks. If I had stood there long enough, somebody prob- ably would have painted me. In Figures 1-4, you see some shots of the lock and the bracket supporting it, the face of the cylinder and the stamp on the back showing where it was made. In Figures 5 and 6, you can see the paint in the keyway and the author using a key extractor to dig some of it out. Figures 7 and 8. The letters stamped on the back of the lock are apparently a blind code for the key. If you have access to an old Eagle code book and can provide the bittings for the key, please contact the author.
