Broken Key Extraction

Keys almost never break without warning. Brass wears, and a key that has been cut and re-cut from a copy of a copy is already a poor fit. Add a lock that has become stiff — dirt in the keyway, a dry cylinder, a door that has dropped so the bolt binds against the keep — and you end up applying force to a worn key. Cold weather makes it worse because brass is more brittle and grease thickens.

The common pattern we see is a door that has been 'a bit sticky for ages'. The stiffness was the actual fault; the snapped key is the symptom. That is why a good extraction visit also diagnoses why the lock was tight, rather than just pulling the metal out and leaving.

Do not push the remaining stub further in while trying to turn it, and do not poke the keyway with a screwdriver, scissors, tweezers or a paperclip. Each of those can drive the fragment deeper, damage the wafers or pins and turn a five-minute job into a cylinder change. Superglue on a matchstick is the classic disaster — it bonds the fragment to the lock internals, and at that point extraction is no longer possible.

Do not spray oil into the keyway either. General-purpose oil attracts dirt and gums up the mechanism; a locksmith uses dry PTFE or graphite for exactly that reason. And if the broken half is still sticking out far enough to grip properly, one gentle, straight pull with pliers is fine — but only straight out, never twisting.

The engineer first aligns the plug so the fragment can move — a broken key usually leaves the cylinder part-turned, and nothing comes out until it is back at the correct position. Then extraction tools are used: a broken key extractor with a barbed hook, a spiral extractor, or a pair of thin key-saw blades worked either side of the fragment to draw it forward.

Once the fragment is out, the lock is tested with the remaining key, the keyway is cleaned and dry-lubricated, and the reason for the stiffness is dealt with — usually a misaligned keep, a dropped door or a worn cylinder. If the cylinder itself has been damaged, it is replaced from van stock, and this is the natural moment to upgrade to a TS007 3-star anti-snap unit rather than fit another basic one.

If your only key is the one that broke, you also need a replacement. We can cut new keys to the existing cylinder in many cases, or supply a new cylinder with fresh keys where that is cheaper or more secure.

The same principles apply beyond front doors. Snapped keys in padlocks, window locks, garage doors, filing cabinets, lockers and gate locks are all routine extractions. Padlocks are the one case where the hardware is sometimes simply not worth saving — if a cheap padlock has a fragment jammed in a corroded keyway, replacing it costs less than the labour to rescue it, and we will tell you that rather than charge for the longer job.

Most visits are finished within thirty to forty-five minutes of arrival.