West Dundee is a river village with a historic downtown and a housing stock that includes many older homes. The distinctive local job is repairing original lock mechanisms rather than replacing them, alongside storefront and delivery door work for the businesses along the commercial strip.

West Dundee combines a revitalized downtown along the Fox River with older residential streets and a commercial corridor. Buildings here have been standing long enough that their doors and hardware have their own history, which changes how the lock work is approached.

We work across the Dundees and the Fox Valley. This page covers historic lock repair, commercial doors and the ordinary household work.

Original mortise locks and repair work

An older entry lock is usually a mortise body with a substantial bolt, and it can normally be repaired. The reasons one stops working are local and specific: a broken spring, a worn cam, corrosion or grit in the case, a bent bolt, or a strike that has moved out of line because the door has settled over decades. Each of those is addressable.

Repairing preserves the escutcheon, the knob or lever, the thumb-turn and the door finish, none of which can be replaced convincingly without a great deal of joinery. It also normally costs less than a replacement assembly, because no new mortise has to be cut and no old one patched.

Strip, clean, repair and lubricate of mortise and period lock mechanisms.
Cylinder replacement or re-pinning to remove keys that cannot be accounted for.
Strike adjustment and reinforcement on doors that have settled.
Deadbolt installation placed around the original hardware rather than through it.
Keyless entry for the main entrance where a household prefers it.

Downtown businesses and delivery doors

Businesses in a historic downtown tend to have two doors with two different jobs. The storefront has to look right and close reliably, which is mostly a closer, hinge and strike question. The rear or delivery door has to be genuinely secure, and on many older buildings it is the weakest opening on the premises: a light frame, a moved alignment, and a passage latch rather than a deadbolt.

The sequence that works is to get the rear door closing and latching reliably first, then put proper hardware on it. A high-security cylinder and a strike anchored into the frame rather than the facing is usually all that is required. Where businesses share a building, a master key system with a sub-master per unit avoids the situation where the key held by one tenant opens the premises of another.

Household work and alignment

For the newer houses in the village the ordinary jobs apply, and for the older ones the alignment issue is usually already well advanced. Heavy clay soils swell and shrink with the water table, freeze-thaw cycles work on foundations and thresholds, and a house that has stood for a century will have moved at least a little.

The tell is a door that has to be lifted to latch, or a deadbolt that binds when the door is closed but turns freely when it is open. That is a strike and hinge problem, and forcing the key instead will eventually break a mechanism that was sound.

Office hours and photos of older locks

Our hours run Monday to Saturday, 08:30 to 17:00, and closed on Sunday. For older hardware, a photograph of the lock face and the door edge is useful, and it helps to know whether the key currently turns at all.

Illinois license 191.000502 is issued by the state of Illinois, and building codes differ by state, so license and code statements here apply to Illinois only. Our service area covers Illinois and Wisconsin.

Locksmith and Security Services in West Dundee, Illinois

Original mortise locks and repair work

Downtown businesses and delivery doors

Household work and alignment

Office hours and photos of older locks

What we do in West Dundee

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