1st Defence Locksmiths Blog

As usual we have been very busy in the run up to Christmas with late night calls to burglary's and gain entry jobs due to lost keys. With many people having office party's at this time of year we get many calls for lost keys as a result of a drunken night out usually in the early hours of the morning. Unfortunately at this time of year we also get a lot of calls to burglary's in Leeds Wakefield and Bradford because it gets darker earlier and thieves know there will be valuable Christmas prese...
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Upvc doors are a big thing these days and have been for a long time now, just look when your walking down a street probably 75% of the doors you see will be upvc. As nice as these doors are they are not without there faults. The most common fault for any upvc or composite door is a locking mechanism failure, If this occurs when the door is unlocked it is bad enough but if this happens when the door is locked shut it is a even bigger problem leaving you either locked in or locked out. The most...
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For a while we  have been meaning to get round to making a company video and to be honest its never happened, being a locksmith does take up a lot of time both out working on site and marketing and we simply never got round to doing it. So what do you do if you don't have time? pay someone! But after doing some research it seems that company's want to charge you a fortune to make a simple 30 second video. So what did we do? We went to our friends at locksmith Sheffield and they sorted us out ...
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Its unbelievable how many Yale locks we have opened this month where people have left there keys inside and shut the door behind them or the door blows shut locking them out. This type of job is really common but we have just had a a lot more than usual in Leeds this month. Its really strange how you get really busy runs of a certain type of job and then it just stops and changes to something else ie all people locked out and then all lock changes ect for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  ...
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Over the past 6 months or so we have noticed a big decrease in the number of out of hour call outs and a increase in early morning calls. Why is this? We keep hearing time after time that customers are afraid to call a emergency locksmith out of normal working hours because they think the cost will be much higher than if they ring in the day time and as a result are putting off calling until early the next day. We have had people who have been burgled late at night leaving there property's in...
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We had 3 jobs last month all with a identical problem. All 3 jobs were small digital safes where the batteries which control the electronic keypad had died. Normally this is not a problem as most small digital safes come with a override key so when the batteries have no power left the door can still be opened and the batteries changed. The batteries go inside the safe on the back of the door so when the batteries die the override key must be used. The problem with these 3 safes in question th...
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Last Saturday around lunchtime we were called to a flat in Leeds city centre to change what was described as a faulty lock. When we arrived on site to take a look the lock was smashed to bits and so was the door and the door frame! The customer said he had come home in the early hours of the morning and lost the keys after a night out and thought it would be too expensive to call a locksmith out at that time in the morning. All the flat doors in this particular block of flats are solid fire d...
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The new Yale anti snap euro lock meets BS EN 1303:2005 requirements and as a result is awarded the British Standard Kitemark. The Yale cylinder also meets the requirements to achieve the Sold Secure SS312 Diamond Standard making this one tough door lock. The lock cylinder has a built in sacrificial point designed to snap off first leaving very little of the lock cylinder to grasp. Further to this the yale anti snap has grip deflectors which also make it very difficult to grasp the remaining p...
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Every summer without fail we get called to property's where the customer has left a door unlocked and things like house keys and car keys have been stolen. Last year we attended a job where the customer had left the front door unlocked and was in the back garden cutting the grass, somebody just walked in the front door picked up the bunch of keys for his office, house and car all on the same bunch and stole the car. This meant obviously that the car was gone but not only that all the locks on...
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So its been a month or so since we started advertising in the Bradford area of West Yorkshire and so far so good. We have attended a few Bradford jobs now and we are pleased to say evrything has gone well. The first job we did from the new locksmiths Bradford website we managed to be at the customers address in Thornbury in less than 30 minutes. The job its self was just a simple gain enrty to a yale lock which only took a few minutes. The speedy response and entry time resulted in one happy ...

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