Salt, slope, and shutters closed for six months
The seafront is a corrosive place. On plage du Midi as along the Croisette, sea spray leaves a salt film that attacks barrels, gate fittings and the runners of garage doors facing due south. A cylinder that catches in those conditions is treated with a dry lubricant, never with oil or a general-purpose penetrating spray, which hold the salty dust in place.
A good part of the Cannes housing stock idles through winter. A flat in La Californie shut up after September sometimes reopens onto a seized mechanism: the key goes in, turns a quarter and stops. Pushing harder at that moment is the surest way to snap a flat key inside the barrel and turn an ordinary reopening into an extraction job.
In Le Suquet it is the timber that dictates. Solid leaves move between the damp rising off the Vieux-Port and the heat of a south-facing wall; the door swells, the keep no longer meets the bolt squarely, and you have to lift to lock. Repositioning the keep settles a problem that replacing the lock would not have solved.
Symptoms not worth ignoring
A key that spins freely almost always means a broken cam or a connection that has come apart inside the case. A soft handle that drops without driving the latch comes from a worn spindle or follower. Both faults are common in the post-war buildings around Prado, where the original ironmongery has done forty or fifty years of service.
On the multipoint locks of the seafront residences, the usual symptom is a top or bottom point that no longer engages. The rods have drifted out of adjustment, a roller has developed play, a keep has moved. Carrying on leaning on the handle eventually bends the rod assembly, and a whole set gets replaced where an adjustment would have been enough.
The diagnosis is made on site, with the door open and the edge plate visible, before any method is announced. A shop lock on the quai Saint-Pierre, worked non-stop through the season, does not wear like a landing door in Petit Juas: the same symptom rarely has the same cause. A detailed quote comes before the work and an itemised invoice after it. One thing to avoid in the meantime: taking the cover off a multipoint without knowing how to refit rods that are under tension.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our locksmith repairs page. This page focuses on what the service involves in Cannes.