About Maryvale Locksmith

Started by Aidan Patel in 2008

Aidan Patel started Maryvale Locksmith in 2008 to do this kind of work for people close to home: getting someone back through a door, then making sure the lock on it is sound. He manages the company today, and the work still follows that order.

The door comes first, because someone is waiting on the wrong side of it. The lock comes straight after, because whatever made it fail is usually still there once the door is open: a cylinder worn smooth, a latch that jams, a key worn thin. A lock that has let someone down once is worth understanding before it does it again.

Customers Across Phoenix and What They Call About

We work for homeowners, renters, landlords, property managers and small business owners across Phoenix, and many of our calls come from Maryvale and nearby Glendale, Tolleson and Avondale. The properties range from single-family houses and apartment complexes to storefronts and offices, along with the cars parked outside them.

Each of them tends to call about something different. A homeowner who has just moved in usually wants the old keys to stop working. A renter locked out of an apartment needs the door opened, and the landlord’s agreement before any rekey. A landlord or property manager between tenants needs every lock on a unit set to a new key, sometimes within a master key system. A shop or an office needs locks that stand up to a door opened all day, and exit hardware that lets people out with one push. And a driver locked out in a parking lot, or down to the last key for a car with a chip, needs the car opened or a spare cut and programmed.

Lockouts, Rekeys, New Locks and Car Keys

For houses, rentals and cars, the work comes in four kinds of visit:

• Home lockouts for houses, apartments and rentals: the door opened the least damaging way, then a look at the lock that let it happen.
• Rekeys and lock changes after a move, a lost key or a change of tenants, with new cylinders or new locks where the old ones are worn out.
• Car keys: car lockouts, spare key cutting, transponder key programming and broken key extraction.
• Lock upgrades: new deadbolts, keypad deadbolts and smart locks, matched to the door’s prep and its frame.

Landlords and property managers rely on the shop for master key systems and lock changes between leases. Businesses call for commercial lock installation, high-security cylinders, panic bars and exit devices, and locks for desks and file cabinets. Most desk and file cabinet locks are small cam locks, which can be replaced or keyed alike, so one key opens all of them.

What a Sound Lock Looks Like

Making sure a lock is sound comes down to a few plain checks. The key slides in and turns without force or jiggling. The bolt throws its full length into a strike plate held by long screws in solid wood, not only in the thin door jamb. The latch catches when the door swings shut, without a push or a lift, and on a deadlatch the small plunger beside it presses in against the strike, so the latch cannot be pushed back from outside. Every key that should open the lock does, and any old key that should not, does not.

When one of those is off, the cause is usually close by: a cylinder worn smooth or packed with grit, a strike that has shifted, a door that has dropped on its hinges. Fixing the cause matters more than forcing the lock, because a bolt that has to be pushed into place wears itself and its strike a little more each time. In Phoenix the sun and the fine dust add their own wear, so a lock that turns hard in summer is often dry or dirty rather than broken.

Each kind of visit has its own short list of what we check, from the strike plate on a front door to the chip in a car key.