Every duplicate begins with a blank, and the blank is chosen by whatever is stamped on the head of the key already in your hand. Richmond covers a wide spread of that, from the late-1940s Burkeville bungalows on Sea Island to West Cambie, where the housing stock is largely post-2010, so whether your key can be copied gets settled on the call rather than at your door.
The cutting is seldom the part that decides a job here. What decides it is whether a blank exists for the profile you are holding, and in Richmond that runs from a Kwikset sold in every hardware aisle to a storefront cylinder on No. 3 Road that nobody can name until you describe it.
Three quite different calls arrive under this heading in Richmond. In the tower corridor, the Brighouse high-rises on No. 3 Road between Granville Avenue and Cook Road and the City Centre buildings along Alderbridge Way and Cook Road, it is nearly always a second suite key: the deadbolt is a Schlage B-series or a Weiser, the building is rental-heavy, and whoever is calling took over a unit that came with exactly one key. On the detached west side one key is seldom the whole request. A Broadmoor house off Williams Road or No. 4 Road usually carries a Schlage or Weiser deadbolt on the main entry and a separate keyed knob or lever on the inside garage door, a side entry or the garden gate, so the ring already holds more than one profile before anyone asks for a copy. Seafair rings are split a different way: the deadbolts there have often been replaced once or twice since the house went up while the original knob sets on the secondary doors have not, so two keys off one ring can be a hardware generation apart. In the Steveston heritage core the question is sometimes whether a copy can be made at all.
The name on the key picks the blank, and the blank decides whether the job finishes on the visit or has to be ordered first. Most of the city is straightforward. Schlage, Kwikset and Weiser, the SmartKey cylinders among them, cover the great majority of suite doors, townhomes and detached entries here, and that stock travels as a matter of course. Two situations fall outside it. Older Richmond hardware can sit on a keyway laid down before the standards now in use, which is the Broadmoor and Steveston end of the problem. Storefront doors in the No. 3 Road malls are the other, because retail units there change tenant often and the cylinder in the door has frequently been replaced more than once since the building opened. Neither is a refusal. Both are a reason to describe the key, and the lock it came out of, while you are still on the phone: a less common cylinder can be carried to the visit when we hear about it beforehand, and cannot be conjured at your door.
| Key type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Ordinary house or door key, each copy | $5–$15 |
| Mailbox, locker, padlock or cabinet key | $8–$20 |
| Price per key on a batch of five or more | $4–$10 |
| Dimple profile (Mul-T-Lock, Kaba and the like) | $20–$45 |
| Restricted or high-security profile, once authorized | $30–$70 |
| Read off the cylinder or cut to code, nothing to copy | $40–$90 |
The figure covers the blank and the work of cutting it. Controlled and dimple profiles sit toward the top of their band, because the blank itself costs more and the tolerances leave less room to be wrong. The call out is settled on the phone once you say where in Richmond you are and how many cylinders you want keys for. A car key is priced on its own page, since the chip is the expensive half of one and the cut is not.
Photograph it or read it out. That one answer sorts the job into stock already on the van, a restricted profile that needs permission before anything is cut, or one of the No. 3 Road cylinders with no blank behind it. If more than one key is going on the machine, say so, because on a Richmond property they are frequently not all the same profile.
The count is what sets the figure. A townhome usually comes to two, a detached west-side house to more than that once the garage entry and any side door or gate are counted in, and an acreage off the Steveston Highway and No. 4 Road corridor to more again, because the workshop and the sheds are on keys of their own. Work that number out before you ring and the quote lands close.
Every copy is gauged and then turned in the cylinder it was cut for, and a copy that binds is recut there and then rather than handed over to fail later in the week. If a fresh key still wants firm pressure, that is the cylinder talking rather than the cut, usually a worn bottom pin or a binding cut, and it is common in the south-end Terra Nova strata townhomes that have been rekeyed through one tenancy after another. You get told which of the two you have.
On the post-2010 side of the city the blank is rarely what holds a job up. Those doors carry hardware more standardised than the older parts of Richmond, Schlage B-series alongside Kwikset and Weiser SmartKey cylinders and the keypad units some developers specified, and every common profile among them travels on the van. The thing worth knowing in a strata building is that cutting a copy of a key you already hold changes nothing about the door. Permission only enters the conversation when somebody wants the hardware itself altered, and that is a question for the council rather than for us.
There is one decision to make before ordering copies on a SmartKey door. That cylinder is built to be re-set to a different key rather than re-pinned, so what people usually want after a move is the old key retired instead of a second one added alongside it. Say which you mean on the call, because the first is a rekey and it is a different line on the bill from a duplicate.
A restricted or patented profile is registered to a keyholder, and the authority to have a copy made sits with that holder rather than with whoever happens to be carrying the key. On a house those are the same person. In a Brighouse or City Centre tower they are often not: where the system belongs to the strata, approval comes from the council or the property manager who registered the keys in the first place, not from the resident. What we need to see is that you are the authorized holder, which in practice means proof of address, a tenancy document, or written approval from the property manager, and the blank for a genuine restricted system is then sourced through the manufacturer's own channel rather than taken off the van. Start that at the booking, because none of it can be settled standing at the door.
On the detached streets in Broadmoor and Seafair the figure follows the number of distinct profiles on your ring, not the number of copies you want taken off them, which is why a request for a spare so often turns into a request for three. Count the profiles before you ring rather than the doors. And if what you are actually after is every one of them opening to the same key, that is not a cutting job at all: it is a rekey, priced on its own, and worth asking for by name.
The oldest doors in the service area are in the Steveston heritage core, on Moncton Street and the streets running between the village and the dyke. Exterior doors there are frequently on mortise locks, where the body of the lock sits in a pocket cut into the edge of the door rather than passing through its face. Duplication for one of those is not a blank pulled off a peg, because the profile has to answer to whatever keyway was fitted when the house was built. Describe the key and the lock when you book, since that is what decides whether the copy is made on the visit or has to be sourced first.
A few Sea Island addresses land in the same category. The Burkeville bungalows date from the end of the 1940s, and on a few of them a secondary entry still carries hardware old enough that there may be nothing to copy onto at all. None of this generalises by neighbourhood name, either. The Steveston townhomes a few blocks north of the heritage streets are ordinary Schlage B-series and Weiser SmartKey, so two addresses within walking distance can need completely different answers to the same request.
Gilmore is where Richmond's residential grid gives way to the Agricultural Land Reserve, and much of what hangs on a ring out there is not a door key at all. Workshops, sheds and equipment buildings close on hasps and padlocks, and a padlock key is its own blank with no relation to the house keyway, so it is cut as its own item rather than bundled in with the entry keys. Those are also the keys most likely to exist in exactly one copy, since nobody duplicates a shed key until the morning it goes missing. A padlock that has seized shut is a different matter and not something a fresh key rescues.
The head of a modern car key carries a transponder chip, and the chip is the half that matters. The blade cuts on the same machine as any house key, but until that chip has been written to your vehicle the engine will not answer to it, so a blade cut on its own leaves you with something that turns in the door and stops there. Different equipment, different job. A spare or replacement for the car belongs on car key replacement, where it is cut and programmed beside the vehicle.
The profile on your key tends to follow the area and the decade it was built in. Pick yours for what is usually fitted there.
A spare is the small end of it. Rekeys after a move, new hardware, smart locks, car keys, safes and master key systems all run off the same van.