A customer in Ashford got in touch after being locked out of their flat. A key had broken inside the lock and they needed help getting back in.
At first I thought the quickest route might be to use the remaining piece of the key to turn the lock, especially as the customer initially expected the cylinder to be replaced anyway. That did not work, so I moved on to extracting the broken piece.
After around 10 minutes I managed to pull out a small fragment. That was when the customer mentioned that a key had broken in the lock before as well, and that an earlier attempt to remove it had left another piece behind. Wonderful news to receive halfway through the job.
Another 10 minutes of careful work followed. I was getting close to abandoning the extraction and drilling the cylinder, which would have opened the door very quickly, when the remaining piece finally came out — by skill and expertise, obviously.
The customer had a spare key ready, so I tested the existing cylinder before replacing anything. It still worked perfectly well. They decided to keep the lock and simply have some more keys cut, so the job ended as a non-destructive opening rather than an unnecessary lock replacement.
