“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”--P. J. O'Rourke If your housekey looks like this, you are in good company. This is the Kwikset KW1 blank, arguably the most common key blank in use for house locks. I should know because I make about a hundred of these suckers everyday. I don't have a magic box like they do at Lowes or Home Depot, where you just put in a key and get a copy. We use an old-fashioned key machine. Sometimes the keys Lowe's and Home Depot keys actually work, but many don't, based on what my customers tell me when they come in for a working copy. A lock's tumbler is an elegantly simple, but extremely precise device. A mistake of a fraction of an inch can keep a copy from working. Most people understand this, but some don't. I personally never need a key made, but lots of people do, which is good for the hardware store. A key blank cost about 15 cents when bought in bulk and most places sell cut keys for a buck fifty or so. There is money in keys, if you have volume. We have a ton of rentals around our store so lots of landlords and tenants are in need of a new key. Especially around the first of the month, when tenants run off with the keys and landlords have to get new copies. I hear every imaginable reason for people to need keys. Some folks just plain lose them, sometimes they wear out. New boyfriends or girlfriends require a new copy. Lots of adult children come in to get copies of their elderly parents keys. We get a lot of keys, especially car keys, that have been broken in half. Sometimes we can make a working copy, but not always. We get keys that are so worn that they are metal wafers. These are hard to copy. I made ten sets of keys for a guy who was giving them out to his nine partners in a time-share in Mexico. I hope he took them to Mexico and tried them before he handed them out. I would hope that no one went to Mexico only to find that their key didn't work correctly. I re-keyed eight locks a few weeks ago for a guy who's estranged wife sneaked into his house and stole all his keys, leaving him locked out. One of my favorite stories is about a guy who came in to make a set of car keys. It seems that his son was moving his family from Denver to Hooterville and the car keys were accidentally packed in a box tha the movers took. He was going to FedEX them a set from his spares. I told him that any locksmith in Denver could fix the problem in an hour, but he was set on a plan and there was no talking him out of it. Many people in the store don't like to make keys, but I find it interesting. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky