How to Remove Door Lock Cylinder without Key | Why Do Keys Get Stuck in Locks | CNCLATHING

What causes a key to get stuck in a lock and how to make the stuck key out of the lock? The YouTuber CLKsupplies explained two reasons for us and you can check more details from his video. 

1. Loose cylinder caps

The first reason for the keys stuck in your door lock is that lock cylinder caps are loosened. For example, a key-in-knob cylinder, commonly found on all sorts of commercial knobs, levers, and deadbolts. There’s a fine line between having it work and having it not work and as a lock is continually warned, that screw cap on the back is going to move as a whole a little bit. When that happens, when you go to try to pull the key out, it’s not going to go because the plug is actually moving out a little bit on the cylinder, and it’s not allowing all those bottom pins to come up. 

Method to get a stuck key out of a lock: All you need to do to fix it is to hold your fingers and push back on the plug while you pull the key out. Once you do that, you can take the cylinder out, flip it around, and all you need to do is push in a little detent and tighten that screw cap a little bit.

On the back of mortise cylinders, there are two screws and a tailpiece. When you operate a mortise cylinder in one of these doors, the tailpiece is actually what’s moving the latch mechanism back and forth, that puts a lot of pressure on that little tiny tailpiece held on by those two screws, and over time, a mortise cylinder that’s worked perfectly fine, all of a sudden the key gets stuck and you can’t get it pulled out. Most of the time, it’s just going to be because the two screws that hold the tailpiece on are a little loose, not allowing the key to actually come out. 

Method to get a stuck key out of a lock: To get the key out, all you really need to do is hold the front of the plug with one of your fingers or both of your fingers and then just pull the key out. Once you have the key out, you want to get the mortise cylinder out of the door and you’re going to tighten up those back two screws that hold the tailpiece on.

2. MACS out of range

Now, this is a reason that’s going to happen when you’re in the middle of a rekeying project. When a key stuck in the lock in the middle of a rekeying project, most likely your MACS (Max Adjacent Cut Specification) is out of factory specs, which means the cuts between the spacing are too extreme and it doesn’t leave enough space on the key in order for it to work properly. If you have like a number one depth, next to a number nine depth, the distance between the two, the traveling inside the cylinder for the top pin, the spring, and the bottom pin to come up and down is going to be too great and it’s not going to allow the key to coming out. It’s going to make it stuck in the door lock. It’s the same thing that can happen also with those cuts. It’s kind of a two-sided problem, you want to avoid it, make sure you’re familiar with it and you don’t break that rule. 

Method to get a stuck key out of a lock: If you find yourself in that situation, you’re gonna have to just take like the cap off, the top of the lock or you’re gonna have to shim it, do something to get that plug out to fix the problem. Now, another little side, a little bonus reason in this area is that if you don’t check for top pins or master pins. If you have too long of top pins, or you have extra master pins in there, that can also cause you problems and not allow that key to come out. Make sure you’re using your master pinning follower to get those master pins out and if you’re still running into problems, you want to check the size of the top pin that you’re using.