The cutting machine travels in the van, so the original never leaves your hand and nothing waits for a store to open. We stock the profiles Vancouver doors actually run: Kwikset and Weiser on the post-war bungalows, Schlage on strata suite doors, mortise cylinders on the pre-war houses out on the west side, plus mailbox, padlock and high-security blanks. Every copy is cut, gauged and turned in your own lock before we pack up.
Two things decide whether a copy turns smoothly. The blank has to be the right profile, and the cuts have to match your original rather than an average of it. We read the key first, cut it on the van, then turn it in the door you will actually be using it on. If it drags, it gets recut before we leave.
Most key copying in Vancouver happens at a self-serve machine in a hardware aisle, and for a plain Kwikset house key that is usually good enough. It stops being good enough the moment the profile is anything else. Vancouver housing is a century old on one block and three years old on the next, so a single afternoon can take in a 1920s Kerrisdale front door, a Cambie Corridor suite sitting on a building keying system, and a Grandview-Woodland walk-up running a keyway that left production decades ago. The van carries blank stock and code data for all three, which is why the job finishes in one visit instead of ending at a shrug and an empty peg.
| Key type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Standard house / door key (per copy) | $5–$15 |
| Mailbox / padlock / cabinet key | $8–$20 |
| Multiple copies (per key, 5+) | $4–$10 |
| Dimple key (Mul-T-Lock and similar) | $20–$45 |
| High-security / restricted key (with authorization) | $30–$70 |
| Key cut from lock or by code (no original) | $40–$90 |
Those ranges cover the blank and the labour. A standard residential blank sits at the bottom of the table. Patented and dimple profiles cost more because the blank is controlled and the tolerances are tighter, and cutting to code costs more again because it is bench work rather than a two-minute duplicate. You get the number on the phone once you read us what is stamped on the key head, and the mobile call-out is quoted in the same breath. Car keys are priced separately, for the reason set out further down.
Photograph it or read out the brand and any numbers stamped on it. That tells us the profile, and whether it is stock we carry, stock we have to order, or a blank only the building’s own supplier is permitted to cut.
A house, an office, a strata lobby, or the kerb outside a building with no visitor parking, which across the downtown peninsula is the normal case. You keep hold of the original throughout.
Each copy is cut to the original bitting, checked on a gauge, and turned in your lock with the door open and again with it shut. A key that works on a swinging door and jams on a latched one is telling you about the frame, and it is better to find that now.
A key stamped Do Not Duplicate is not a suggestion, and on a genuine patented system the blank is not sold to us in the first place. Two things follow from that. Where the profile is one we may legally cut, we still want to see that the key is yours to copy: a lease, a recent bill in your name, or a message from the landlord or property manager settles it, and a tenant does not need the owner standing there. Where the profile belongs to a registered system, the blank is not ours to cut at all, and you will hear that on the phone rather than after we have driven across town. Two minutes on the call beats a wasted afternoon at either end.
The towers downtown, in Yaletown and along the Cambie Corridor put a condition on a spare that a house never has. Where your suite cylinder forms part of the building keying system, the copy has to stay on that system’s profile, because a generic blank that happens to fit the keyway can still foul the emergency master the building holds. Some stratas write that condition into their bylaws and plenty do not, so the honest answer is to check your own before ordering a set of six. What we can tell you at the door is what the cylinder is, and whether the key in your hand is a building key or a plain suite key. Those are not always the same key, and people are often surprised by which one they have been carrying.
On the west side the key itself changes. Shaughnessy, Kerrisdale, Point Grey and the older Kitsilano blocks off West 4th and Point Grey Road still have front doors that were hung before the bored deadbolt existed, and some of them take a long-shank bit key rather than a flat blade. A bit key does not go through a duplicator. It is filed to match the wards inside that particular lock, from the surviving key where there is one and from the lock itself where there is not. The same applies to the small skeleton-key inserts that turn up behind the cover plate on a 1930s door. It is slower, it is priced as cut-from-lock rather than duplication, and it is still cheaper than throwing out an original lock body with another fifty years in it.
A copy is only ever as good as the lock it goes into. In the 1960s and 70s walk-ups along Cornwall and the blocks running back from Kits Beach we regularly meet a cylinder repinned through so many tenancies that nothing turns cleanly any more, the owner’s own key included. Cutting a sharper copy of that key will not fix it, and we would rather say so than sell you three of them. The answer there is a fresh cylinder or a rekey onto new pins, done at the same visit. If the key turns but the bolt will not shoot, the problem is usually the frame rather than the lock, and that belongs on the door repair page.
Two calendars drive most of the spare-key work we do here. One is academic: out at UBC and the endowment lands a large share of the leasehold suites and shared houses change hands at the end of August and again in late April, with quieter mid-term swaps whenever one person leaves a shared suite and the others would rather not hand over the only key. The other is the suite economy on the east side and along Commercial Drive, where character houses were divided into two, three and four addresses decades ago and every handover needs a set of its own. The rule we give either way is the dull one. Key alike only the doors a single person is entitled to open. A tenanted suite, a coach house or a garden suite stays on its own key, and the owner keeps a separate key for the shared doors.
The van works the whole city, and what rides in it shifts with the address. Hastings-Sunrise is post-war bungalows on Parker, Graveley and Kitchener, most of them with a suite carved into the basement since, so the standing order there is a fresh set cut at each tenant handover. Downtown the answer changes from one street to the next: a strata tower on Burrard or Nelson is fob entry at the lobby and a plain deadbolt on the suite door, while the heritage conversions on Cambie and Beatty often run keyways that were never standard stock. Point Grey and Dunbar are the mortise end of the city, where a 1920s door on Tolmie or Drummond Drive gets matched to its own keyway or cut from the lock rather than copied off a blank. In the new Oakridge Park towers the unit door is ordinary Schlage or Kwikset cylindrical hardware sitting behind an electronic building system, so the key we cut opens your suite and nothing else in the building. We also cut out in Burnaby, Richmond, New Westminster and Coquitlam. Since there is no counter to drive to in the first place, the only difference between those addresses and a Vancouver one is the length of the drive.
A car key made after roughly 2000 carries a transponder that has to be coded to the vehicle, so a blade cut from the right profile will open the door and then sit there while the engine declines to start. Different machine, different job. It lives on the car key replacement page: cutting and programming for spares, fobs and push-to-start remotes, done at the car wherever it happens to be parked.
Each area page sets out what the doors are like there, which hardware keeps turning up, and how long the van takes to reach you.
A spare key is often the smallest part of the visit. These run off the same van, with the same licensed technician.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
Residential Security Container (RSC) burglary classification: a key-locked security container designed to provide entry…
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.