Mortise Pick Tip

As a locksmith technician. you tend to run into jobs sometimes that will give many aggravations. Most of the jobs I found to be difficult and time consuming are commercial type jobs. Recently i got called to an  office building downtown. The customer who called me had a private office in the building and he seem to misplace the keys to the office. Normally, most of the office doors I ran into during my years in the field all had a Mortise type lock. These locks are much more heavy duty than the traditional standard key-in-knob lock and sometimes can be a hassle to open them. The Mortise mechanism is fairly complex which makes it very difficult to pick.

Once I got to the job site, all my suspicions turned to be true. The office door did had a Mortise type lock on it. There are only two options usually when facing this type of lockout job. One is to try and pick the lock, the other is drill and replace the lock with a new one. Unfortunately, that day I did not have any Mortises with me in the service vehicle, and I was also under the impression the customer will not be so thrill to pay extra couple hundreds because he lost his keys.

I reached out to my picking tool set and started working on the lock. As I was working it, I had some trouble turning it as the cylinder required a lot of force to turn, and my skinny pick tool set just wasn't cutting it. I then remembered of an advice one of my fellow locksmith technicians gave me once about using a key blank as an extra force to get the cylinder to turn and at the same time prevent from the pins to fall and mess the cylinder. Luckily, I did have a blank for that type of Mortise cylinder with me, so I figured it was worth a try. What I had to do was pick the lock with my pick tool just enough to turn it a little and then use the blank to turn it all the way to retract the bolt, and it worked! The customer was very satisfied from the fact I could open the door without drilling the lock and even gave me a tip.

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