If you’re a property owner or landlord and ever have the need to permanently disable the locks on your rental property quickly, look no further than Lock-Kill.
The folks at DG3 Locksmithing have come up with an ingenious way to modify a key blank to ensure you can quickly restrict access to a household lock without needing to call out a locksmith to rekey. Provided you still have a way into the dwelling that is.
By taking Schlage and Kwikset key blanks and cutting a 90 and 45 degree angle into them, DG3 has effectively created a way to bind the Lock-Kill key in the cylinder. As it’s inserted the 90 degree wall allows each pin to drop into the valley and the 45 degree cut allows that same pin to pull back out until the Lock-Kill key is inserted completely. To further complicate matters, the head of the key has a groove etched into it that makes it easy to snap it off, simply leaving the broken key in the lock with nothing to grip to remove.
I’ve had these Lock-Kill keys for some time now but wanted to thoroughly test them to see if there was any way to remove it before I wrote up an article on them. Picking didn’t work, bumping the lock didn’t work and neither did a broken key extractor. I couldn’t get a pick into the keyway with the Lock-Kill key still in there and with the head of the key broken off, there’s nothing to tap when bumping. The key extractor didn’t work because that pin was still locking the blank in.
You could take some needle-nose pliers, grip the broken-off key and tap the cylinder or pliers in an attempt to bump the pins, but I couldn’t get it to work. The only way to gain entry again would be to either have another way in, which hopefully you do if you’re the landlord and you’re using Lock-Kill, or to drill the lock. In the video below I show how gaining access to the pins will allow you to remove Lock-Kill, so if you’re skilled enough to be comfortable removing pins and you have access to take the lock apart, there is a way to remove the device.
Lock-Kill is definitely a sure fire way to ruin someone’s day if doors are the only means of entry and this review certainly isn’t meant to highlight that. If you have a true need to quickly disable a lock for legal reasons, Lock-Kill will do the job well. If you ever encounter Lock-Kill being used for unintended purposes, my hope is that this review will at least give you a heads up on what you’re dealing with.
Lock-Kill keys can be purchased directly from lockkill.com in Schlage and Kwikset blanks. They’re also currently on sale for 1/2 off with free shipping at the time of this write-up.