Most people tend to lock their doors at night and think they’ve secured their home. But that’s far from true if you don’t have the right locks, on the right doors! With a technique called “lock snapping”, burglars can easily break your lock in half, without even using any specific tools, within seconds. Most of the time, they do it with such ease that they’ll be in and out of your home so quickly that you won’t even notice until you figure out that something was stolen!
This is a cause for alarm. Lock snapping can be done by any petty criminal, anywhere in the world. However, this doesn’t mean that every lock on every single door is going to be this easy to break. Lock snapping has been happening for years, which is why special locks were created keeping the technique in mind so they couldn’t be broken the way regular locks did, these locks are called “Anti-Snap locks”
What Are Anti-Snap Locks? How Are They Different From Regular Locks?
Before we get into how anti-snap locks work, we have to talk about the locks that we usually have in our doors, these are called Euro cylinder locks. These are pretty standard all over the world. The lock is made in a way that it’s fused in the middle, that fuse is what makes it vulnerable to an attack.
A burglar who knows what they’re doing will be able to lodge just about anything thin into your lock and hit it with a certain amount of force, kind of like how a chisel is used, and immediately, the lock will break in two pieces. This gets rid of the locking mechanism and the door will just swing open!
Years of research went into studying this technique, and anti-snap locks were created to counter it. The first thing that’s different about these compared to standard euro cylinder locks is the cylinder itself. It is much stronger, made to withstand copious amounts of force if it were to come its way.
This on its own makes the locks a lot safer to use than the regular ones. If a burglar can’t snap your lock as they usually can, the additional effort required to break in might deter them from going through with the burglary, however, some will simply put in the work! This is why the cylinder is built differently.
Where euro cylinders are in two pieces, anti-snap lock cylinders are in three pieces. The section that has the main locking mechanism, is one solid piece itself. This is so if a burglar decides that they’re going to try harder and exert even more force into breaking your lock, it will break, but not the way they had hoped.
Anti-snap locks break into 3 separate pieces. This way, the piece that matters, the one your main locking mechanism is in, stays in its place, keeping the lock intact. By trying to snap a lock like this, all the burglar will accomplish is locking the door even more than it was before! This is why anti-snap locks are the way to go! So when you lock them, they stay in place!
Installing an anti-snap lock
All anti-snap locks come with a kitemark engraving, but not every single type of lock will fit your door. If you can’t figure out which one will fit your door perfectly, call an Atlanta Locksmith or any recommended locksmith in your area to come and survey your doors. They will be able to measure your doors and recommend the best anti-snap lock for you and you can have your locks professionally fitted by them too! That way, you’ll be 100% sure that you have the right locks, and that they’re fitted perfectly. So when you lock your doors at night, they’re there to stay until you unlock them!