DIY: Re-Key Your Locks with Kwikset SmartKey – Danny Lipford

Or don’t buy something more reliable?

KwikSet has a line of locks called “Smart Key” locks, that allow you to retool the cyclinder with a included keytool.  It works well, and I haven’t had a problem with it….

Until yesterday when my wife reported that “we were having a problem with locking the door…”.

I tried my key, and it’s not working.  The original key, isn’t working nor the key that I set it to.  Guess what I found?

DIY: Re-Key Your Locks with Kwikset SmartKey – Danny Lipford.

Yes, read the comments…  From September 2009, there are comments referring to Smart Key systems “dropping a pin”, and thus making the locks completely useless, locking their owners out.

Right…  Fantastic product.

As of Feb. 20th, 2010, the SmartKey locks have been “re-engineered to make it less likely to have a pin drop.”

Right…  Well, since I don’t want to swap out the cyclinder, I’m going to give this one more try, but I can’t recommend KwikSet products at this time.

What’s VQ_VERYLOWDISK & why is it in my log?

For example:

9/4/10 1:48:31 PM KernelEventAgent[72] tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_LOWDISK, VQ_VERYLOWDISK (516)

This indicates that Mac OS X has detected a drive (hard drive, RAM drive, Zip Drive, etc), that is very low or out of disk space.  If this is your boot drive, you will receive a POP up warning message that the disk is out of disk space.

How to fix this?  Free some disk space up from the drive in question, burn files to DVD, Delete unnecessary files or move them to a external drive.