72 • HINTS & TIPS
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Back to Basics – Key Cutting by Hand
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MARK WARD OF ANGLIA LOCKSMITHS looks back at the beginning of his career when filing keys was one of his very first lessons . Despite learning this skill 30 years ago , here he discusses why the technique is just as important today …
When I was starting my career as a locksmith back in the 1980s one of my first ever lessons was to be able to duplicate a key without the use of a key cutting machine . I think the main reason for this was to teach me on how to use a file correctly . We have all heard the saying “ it ’ s a file not a saw ” which was drummed into me from the very start but this was a very valuable lesson on learning how to keep a file straight and to get used to some very basic locksmith skills which we should all still have .
The principles of this lesson of duplicating keys by hand can be adopted for all types of cylinder keys too but for this article I will concentrate on flat keys only due to the fact that there are still many oddballs about and most people will probably not have a machine suitable to simply copy them .
Following these few easy steps I hope this will now give a few locksmiths
enough confidence on giving it a go rather than just saying no and turning future possible work away .
Flat keys are still fairly common and can be found on window locks , garage door locks , padlocks , suitcases , lockers , tractors , plant machinery as well as many other applications still in use today and are probably one of the easiest types of keys to duplicate by hand as there are no complicated side grooves ( some may have a very basic wide groove on one side which can easily be added at the end with the use of a round file ).
Just to refresh ourselves I will go through the basic parts of a flat key as these will be referred to later on ; bow , throat , cut , stop , tip , and blade .
FIRST , FIND A BLANK : Finding a flat key blank to match is very simple . The blank does not have to be perfect as it can be filed down quite easily to suit , even if the blank is a little thicker it can be thinned down but you just need to make sure it is long enough , wide enough and thick enough then you can begin . Even just a flat piece of steel will suffice to start off with . If you need to alter the blank in any way now is the time do so and once you are happy with the length , width and height you can start to copy the cuts …
• I was originally taught on how to smoke a key by holding it over a candle and blackening all the cuts – but this can now be done using Engineers Blue or a fine black Sharpie pen .
• Be sure that every cut on the original key is blackened fully .
• Once blackened , it is time to clamp the two together with the original key behind the blank in a vice making sure the blade and tip are in perfect alignment .
• Then , clamp the bows together using a C clamp and remove from the vice and double check the pair are in perfect alignment .
LOCKSMITHJOURNAL . CO . UK | SEP / OCT 2018