Kwikset Deadbolt Removal

Residential jobs for the average locksmith technician are not as common as automotive services. However, most of the time they are more rewarding, but takes much longer to do. Normally, when I get a residential type job such as a lock change, lock repair, or re-key, it would usually takes around an hour or even a bit more to do the work. It usually depends on the amount of locks that need service and if I would run into some issues during the process. What would happen if a locksmith technician would run into a job where there a large amount of locks to service and some issues in the process?

Recently I got a call from a real-estate company who owns few apartment complexes in the area. They had an elderly apartment complex property with around 200 units which they needed a re-key done on all of them. This type of job would normally take about almost a week to do for the average locksmith technician and about couple of days for a couple of experienced technicians. I knew I would probably needed to start the job by myself and maybe my Portland locksmith co worker would come during the week to help.

The first thing I did when arriving to the property was determining the type of locks that needed to be re-key which was a Kwikset interconnected lever lock and a deadbolt installed on each unit's door. As I was started doing the work, I noticed that the deadbolts were held by a bolt that had a flat-blade screwdriver in the head of it and had a small sized hole at the center of it. I thought it was kinda awkward since I never seen these types of bolts before. Nevertheless, using my power drill to unscrew these bolt was a nightmare in the first day since they seem to strip very easily because of the their flat-blade head form.

These issues I experienced in the first day seemed to slow me down significantly and when doing a large scale time consuming job such as that, this is the last thing you want to happen as a locksmith technician. I called my co worker the day after to come help and maybe fins a solution to the problem with bolts that were holding the deadbolts. When he got there, I explained him the situation and the issues I had with the bolts and he said that he ran into this type of problem before and luckily had a solution for it. He had a flat-bladed drive bit that was customize to handle these types of flat blade head bolts with the hole in the center. Once we have that issue with the bolts taken care of, we were able to finish the job in a couple of days as planned.