The North Shore runs from waterfront towers to streets whose doors have never been off their original hardware, and the blank stock has to cover all of it. The van carries the range, cuts house, suite, mailbox, padlock and restricted keys at the address, and turns each one in the lock it was made for before anybody drives off.
Some of these calls are a second key for a door that has only ever had one. Others are the opposite problem: a ring nobody can account for, on a Lonsdale walk-up that has been turning over tenants for decades.
Which blanks leave with the technician gets settled on the phone, because nothing here is standard. A waterfront tower on Esplanade was handed over on developer-fitted Schlage and Kwikset B-series deadbolts, and hardware of that vintage copies without complaint. A Norgate bungalow on Queensbury Avenue may still be turning whatever was fitted when it went up in the 1950s. West Vancouver stretches it furthest: post-war bungalows near Marine Drive, architect-designed houses on Mathers and Inglewood Avenues, waterfront condominiums along Argyle and Bellevue. Nothing over there is uniform enough to guess at, which is why the trucks carry a wide selection rather than one tray of whatever moves fastest. Say what is stamped on the head of your key when you call and the stock question is answered before anyone sets off.
A call to a strata on Lonsdale is usually about more than the front door. The suite has its own deadbolt, the lobby mailbox is a second cylinder, and where the building gives you a keyed storage locker that is a third. They are seldom the same profile, and the locker is the one people forget about until the afternoon they need into it. Bring all of them down when the technician arrives and they get cut in one visit instead of three. Vintage decides the rest. The towers that went up north of the Quay through the 2000s and 2010s came with B-series hardware that copies cleanly. Climb Lonsdale between 15th and 22nd and the range widens to take in 1980s low-rises alongside 12- and 15-storey buildings, so a suite on an upper floor of one can be on quite different hardware from the walk-up across the street. That does not change the work. It changes what rides on the van, which is the reason for asking on the call. The one item nobody cuts is the fob: parkade, lobby and amenity entries are strata property, and a replacement for those is issued by the council or the building manager.
Parts of the North Shore have never had their locks changed at all. Caulfeild was built out in earnest between the 1960s and the 1980s, and plenty of the split-levels off Birch Road still carry the deadbolts and lever sets they were finished with. Fifty-year-old hardware sometimes has worn tumblers, a corroded housing, or a keyway that is simply not made in fresh blanks any more. The north end of Norgate is older again, rows of postwar bungalows where a good share of the front doors have never been off their first hardware. Pemberton Heights says it a third time along Pemberton Avenue and Cloverley Street, where older Weiser and Schlage cylindrical knobs are frequently still doing the work. On doors like those, copying quietly turns into sourcing. Where the profile is still in production we cut it and that is the end of the matter. Where production stopped years ago, the real question is whether a door should stay on a keyway with no future supply, and that is the owner deciding with the facts in front of them rather than a technician deciding on a driveway. The older West Vancouver strata stock puts the same problem the other way round, because a mortise body there can be far harder to find parts for than its key is to cut, so those doors get properly looked at before anybody promises a result.
| Key type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Standard house or suite key, each copy | $5–$15 |
| Mailbox, padlock, locker or cabinet key | $8–$20 |
| Each key on a batch of five or more | $4–$10 |
| Dimple profiles such as Mul-T-Lock | $20–$45 |
| High-security or restricted key, authorized holder | $30–$70 |
| Decoding a cylinder, or cutting to code, with no original | $40–$90 |
Blank and labour are both inside those bands. The first row covers most of what a residential visit here involves. A controlled or dimple profile sits higher, because a controlled blank costs more and there is less margin in the cuts themselves. Reading a cylinder when no key survives is the slowest work on the list and sits at the foot of the table for exactly that reason. Give us a cylinder count and whatever is stamped on the head, and the number is agreed before anyone leaves. Car keys have a page and a price list of their own, for the reason set out below.
Photograph the head or read the brand out. The brand settles which blank is needed, and that in turn settles whether the job finishes today or waits on an order. On untouched Norgate and Caulfeild hardware the stamp has often worn away completely, so describe the key instead and a wider range of stock rides along. Say how many keys you want and whether they all come off the same original, because two originals is two separate blank questions.
This is not a lockout, so the lock matters more than the address does. Every cut gets tried in the cylinder it was made for, which means meeting at the suite door rather than down in the lobby, or at the house rather than at the kerb. Out on the upper Caulfeild streets and around Panorama Drive in Deep Cove, give a street number and the nearest cross street when you book, because the last part of that approach is local knowledge rather than something an app finishes for you.
Every copy is gauged against the original first, then turned in the cylinder it was made for. Anything that catches is recut on the spot. Occasionally a copy measures correctly and still drags, and that is worth knowing rather than guessing at: where a cylinder has been re-pinned through one tenancy after another, the wear sits in the chambers and not on your blade, and no quantity of fresh keys will talk it round. You hear that at the door, with replacement hardware already on the van.
The case for cutting a second key while a technician is already standing there gets stronger the further out the address sits. Deep Cove is at the far end of Dollarton Highway, and the streets climbing off Panorama Drive are narrower than a map admits. Horseshoe Bay sits in the cove where the highway stops, and both the terminal loop and the Nelson Avenue connector tighten up on sailing days. An evening lockout at either of those is a longer wait than the same call on Lonsdale, and the key that would have prevented it is the cheapest row on the table above. Lynn Valley runs a scheduled version of the argument, because the short-term rental properties over by the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge are rekeyed between guests, and a full set cut in one visit costs less per key than the same keys cut one at a time across a season.
A car key does two jobs with one piece of metal. Cutting the blade is ordinary work for the machine on the van. The chip buried in the head has to be recognised by the vehicle's immobiliser before the engine will start, and that is programming equipment rather than a cutting wheel, so a blade-only copy opens the door and then sits in the ignition achieving nothing. Different work, different pricing. A spare for whatever is parked in the Lonsdale Quay parkade, at a trailhead off Mount Seymour Parkway, or in a ferry lane at Horseshoe Bay belongs on the car key replacement page.
What sits on the van changes with the area: mortise blanks for the older stock, European profiles for the multi-point doors above Taylor Way. Each one has a page of its own on the hardware and the access on those streets.
Cutting is often the smallest part of the visit. These are the jobs it usually turns into.