I bought a G note of Schlage locks about two or three months ago from Home Depot. The old Master design. Dead bolts.
The spacing is off on half of them by .020. They cut the keys wrong. Then they installed shorter pins from the get go to make the shear line clear but they ride on the upper slope. When you key one up to specs the pins ride too high.
Solution:
Cut a key by code or use the old style nickle silver pre cut for proper spacing. Duplicate from there.
Glen
funny thing I am seeing a LOT of 'bad from the box' keys any more.. local car lot has some after market transponders that you cannot copy.. even THEY cant make a copy for a customer. its off by in some cases almost .010 in the depths..
ran into some bad KW's once too, the depth was way off, being right in the middle, between cuts. a 3 ended up being almost a 3.5 depth.. had to repin a bunch, new right out of the box
--Shiva--
Yea, the KW1 seems shallow too. I've seen this. From the other G of Kwiksets come to think of it but not as bad as the IR quality. Even Von Duprin is going to hell. Big companies, go figure.
How about this for a solution:
Return the locks for replacement. This way the quality control folks (or whatever they call themselves) can perhaps come to the conclusion that shipping out junk only means you have to pay freight 4 times instead of once so it is not a good idea.
They don't care Roger. I'm small time. The quality is way down and they know it.
Bunk. Every time something is returned somebody has to process the return. If you are the only person having the problem, than it is not much of a problem and nothing will change, but when lots of product gets returned, the bean counters get real nervous and changes are instituted.
If they don't know they can't fix it.
You might also contact the factory rep to report the problem.
That might not be your only problem with these locks. I've gone on at least 15 service calls (none of them were my installs) in the last year regarding this deadbolt. It's always been the same problem - after using the lock for a while, usually within 2 months of install, all of a sudden the customer can't retract the deadbolt with either the key or thumb-turn The cause was the same on all of them. The hollow pin that joins two parts of the hinge that controls the bolt going in and out, had fallen out.
I called Schlage, they agreed to replace the locks depending on when they were purchased. They didn't want the old ones back - that should say something in itself.
I tried several different things to try to get the pin to stay in, including using a nail set to try to widen both ends of the pins to keep them in. I put them in some practice doors and no matter what I did, the pins continued to fall out with use. For what it's worth, almost all of the customers admitted buyingt the locks on eBay in a combo pack with an F series "Bell" keyed entry.
Skip
I find that the typical failure on these is a failure of the bolt. This is usually caused by either binding or a less than perfect job in drilling the cross bore.
I have also had a couple of lockouts caused by the installer putting the lock in a 2 1/8 prep but leaving out the adapter ring. This lockout can be cured by gently tapping the outside cylinder back into alignment. The way you can tell if this is the problem is when you turn the key you still have some bolt action, just not enough.
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