BACK TO BASICS Time Is Money Don’t take on the responsibility of hand- ing out keys yourself; that’s too much li- ability. What if you give the wrong key to the wrong person? Just make sure that you’ll have several control and operating keys for the installation. Make arrange- ments to have all the doors you’ll work on unlocked or for you to be supplied with the old keys so that you can open them yourself. Look the job over and make sure you have the right backsets for the doors you’re working on. Make sure the locks will fit 1⅜" doors if that’s what’s there; some heavy-duty locks won’t fit on thin doors. Conversely, make sure you have longer screws if the doors are extremely thick. This is also a good time to ask if there’s a locked storage or supply room where you can store all the material and pos- sibly your Rubbermaid carts. This is im- portant if you know the job will take several days to complete and you’d like to leave your already-set-up-cart at the site. A copy of the building’s floor plan is helpful, as is a copy of the schedule for each installer. If you’re working in a school during the school year, it’s a good idea to ask if the installation can be done from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. In most of the schools I’ve worked with, there are night custo- dians who clean aſter-hours. Most school systems won’t allow you to do a large in- stallation during the day anyway. That is why these types of installations are oſten done during the day in the summer and on holiday breaks. Another thing you need know is what to do with the hardware you remove. Since the maintenance shop will usually want to scrap it, they’ll oſten provide you with Sheetrock buckets or garbage cans for the parts. On other jobs, we’ve closed the old locks up in the boxes that the new ones came in. 48 KEYNOTES APRIL 2016 “Realize that the guy install- ing the locks is only as fast as the quality of the prep allows him to be.” The Process Let’s assume you have a team of three peo- ple and your task is to remove old mor- tise locks, prep and install mag kits/wrap around plates, and prep and install new cylindrical locks and IC cores. You’re go- ing to start on the third floor of the build- ing and work your way down to the base- ment. You’re working from 3 to 11 p.m. because the kids have school the next day. If each team member went to a door, removed the old hardware, prepped the door and installed the new locks, in- stalled the core and cleaned up, you might each do two to three complete installs per hour. Because you’re constantly changing bits and hole saws, placing and removing jigs, etc., you’re wasting a lot of motion to get the job done. The key to making this work is to break the installation down into different steps, with each person do- ing one step repeatedly instead of doing the whole installation at once. For the first step, everybody loads his cart with hardware and proceeds to the first door. One guy checks the schedule while the other two start dropping the necessary hardware at each door. If ev- erybody has a control key, the cores can be dropped off as well, or they can be in- stalled later. If you are reusing old cores, remove them and leave them at each door with the new lock. You’ll want to lay out as much hard- ware as you believe you can reasonably finish by the end of the night and then stop. If you lay out too much and there’s school the next day, you’ll need to pick them up because you can’t leave the lock boxes lying beside the doors. Once you do this type of install a few times, you’ll get better at guesstimating what you can get done in a certain time period. Once everybody has laid out their tools on their carts, the next step is to start strip- ping off the old hardware. At this point, all three of you pick a door and start remov- ing the old locks. Aſter you’ve done two doors each, one guy goes back to the first door with a jig and starts drilling the 2⅛" hole and whatever post holes are required for the outside lever (and possibly notch- ing the the door edge for the wrap-around plate). He repeats this on each door, fol- lowing the other two down the hallway as they strip off the old locks. This is a critical point: If you lay out 50 locks and strip down 50 doors but you can’t complete them that day, you’ve shot yourself in the foot. If the building will be in use the next day, you’ll wind up putting old hardware back on because no one is going to appreciate doors without knobs. Remember what I said above: “what you can reasonably do...” A second critical point: You might want to complete the installation on the first door before advancing down the hallway to make sure there are no surprises. Sup- pose — and this has happened to me — you’re replacing mortise lock for mortise lock, and the pocket for the old lock isn’t deep and/or wide enough. This isn’t a big deal, but it is a time killer that will slow you down enough that you will wind up reinstalling old locks before you leave. Realize that the guy installing the locks is only as fast as the quality of the prep allows him to be. The guy drilling the holes should do the prep on the first door and test fit the new lock to make sure it WWW.ALOA.ORG
