A customer in Hersham got in touch after snapping a key in the front-door Yale lock. They had managed to get inside, but the broken section was still buried in the cylinder and they could not remove it.
This one turned into one of the most stubborn broken-key extractions I had dealt with. I spent the better part of 30 minutes working on it and reached the point where drilling the cylinder out and replacing it was starting to look tempting.
The key shape explained why it had broken and why extraction was so awkward. One cut was extremely high while the next two were close to their maximum low positions. That left a very thin section of metal between deep changes in the profile.
The snapped key was also a copy made from particularly soft material, which had not helped its chances of surviving repeated use.
That profile made the extraction tool’s job difficult as well. Instead of getting a clean edge to grip, the tool kept scraping small pieces from the broken key.
I kept working at it rather than destroying a serviceable lock, and eventually the broken section came out intact enough to clear the cylinder. It was the longest I had spent retrieving a snapped key up to that point, but the existing lock was saved.
