Between two stays, the cylinder is enough
On the Golfe-Juan seafront keys change hands several times a season: weekly tenants, the person who cleans, a caretaker, the owner back in September. Replacing the cylinder between two occupancies puts an end to copies going round the town. The lock body stays exactly where it is, and nothing inside the door leaf is touched.
The job comes down to one screw on the faceplate and a cylinder of the same dimensions. The trick is measuring the right ones: length either side, the backset, the thickness of the leaf. In the 1960s and 1970s seafront blocks the flat doors have often been reworked once or twice, and the original figures no longer mean much.
If the same key opens the hall, the bike store or the underground garage of the block, the replacement has to keep that arrangement working. That is a master-key system, and it goes through the building manager or the supplier who holds the key records. Tell them beforehand, not afterwards: nobody wants to do the work twice.
Workshop doors take nothing off the shelf
The potters' town has converted a great many ground floors. A former workshop turned home or shop usually keeps its original door: a wide leaf, sometimes in metal, a rim lock screwed to the timber, a keep bedded into stone. Nothing sold off the shelf fits these, because the dimensions never quite land where they should.
Two ways forward exist. Keep the old case and change only the cylinder where the mechanism is sound, or take the whole thing off and fit a current lock with a new backplate and keep. That choice is made once the case is open, never from a photograph. Decades of clay dust settled inside the mechanism count as well.
On the villas at Les Encourdoules and on the Super-Cannes slope the front door is only one link in the chain: a powered gate, a pedestrian gate, a garage door and a service door sometimes hang on the same keyring. Changing the house cylinder without looking at those leaves half the problem standing outside. List every key on the ring before deciding anything.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our lock and cylinder replacement page. This page focuses on what the service involves in Vallauris.