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Locksmithing Tips Wrong SFIC Tailpiece For The Job - No Problem!

Welcome to 'How to get it done: Locksmith tips.' I was chatting with my friend Tom Lynch with the Society of Professional Locksmiths the other day, and if you're not familiar with his organization, there's a link in the notes below. He talked about when you're on the job and don't have the right length of IC core tailpiece. Well, if you're not entirely familiar with how it works on these little SFIC cores, on the back, there are two holes.

These two holes are the place to insert the tailpiece in the back to operate the lock. And what would happen is after you pin up the cylinder, put the tailpiece on, insert it into the lock, and then you were to use it.

If after doing that and all of a sudden, when you go to turn the keys, nothing's happening on the lock side of things, it's because the tailpiece isn't long enough. It's not engaging into the back of the lock. This can happen if you find yourself with the seven-pin tailpieces on a six-pin core or if you find yourself having to purchase individual IC core tailpieces, and you find that they're not quite long enough.

Have a look at the six and the seven-pin tailpieces. You'll see the black one, that's the six-pin, and what's called the gold color metal-colored one is the seven pins. As you can see, the seven-pin is shorter than the six pins.

 

What happens if you find yourself in a situation where you don't have the correct tailpiece, but you still want to get the job done and make your customers happy? All you need to do is grab a couple of your universal top pins, or you could use a Schlage top pin or a Kwikset top pin. For this case, I'm going to use a .150, but you can experiment with it. If you put too large of top pins in, well, it's going to get jammed up, and you probably won't able to get the cylinder in all the way. If you don't put a long enough one in, well, you're still going to have the same problem. So you can experiment with it, but about a .150 or .160 is typically going to be right where you're going to need to be

So I got a couple of the .150; I'm going to put one top pin in the back of each of the two holes here. We'll pop them in just like that. It's that simple.

At that point, you can go, and we can take our shorter tailpiece or seven-pin tailpiece on our six-pin lock. We can stick it in there, and now, it's going to be the right length that we need to get the job done.

I hope this is helpful. Thank you, guys, for watching, and we'll see you next time.

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