Broken Key Extraction in Mississauga

The instinct when half a key is sticking out is to grab it with pliers and pull, and it is worth resisting for one specific reason: if the visible piece breaks off flush with the face of the lock, the job gets substantially harder.

So if any part of the blade is protruding, and only if it is protruding and you can get a proper grip, pull straight out with no twisting. Twisting snaps it flush. If it does not come easily, stop there.

What not to do, in any circumstance: do not push the remaining piece further in, do not try to turn it with a screwdriver, do not squirt oil into the keyway, and do not attempt the superglue trick that circulates online. Glue does not reliably bond to a broken edge under tension, and when it fails, which it usually does, you have a lock with adhesive cured around the wafers and an extraction that is now genuinely difficult.

Keys almost never break without warning. They break at the end of a process that has been visible for months.

The tools are thin, hooked or barbed steel probes designed to slide into the narrow space alongside the blade within the keyway. There is very little room, which is why the right tool matters and why a paperclip or a jigsaw blade generally makes things worse.

The technician first works out which way the blade is sitting and whether the wafers or pins are bearing down on it. Where they are, gentle tension is applied to relieve that pressure so the blade is not being clamped while it is drawn out. Then the extractor is inserted along the cuts, the barb is engaged behind a cut, and the piece is pulled straight out.

Sometimes two extractors are used together, one either side, to keep the blade square as it comes. On a broken key that has gone in at an angle, the piece may need to be rotated back to the vertical before it will clear.

In the great majority of cases the lock is entirely unharmed and works normally afterwards with a new key. Drilling the cylinder is a last resort and applies mostly to locks that were already seized, where the break was a symptom rather than the problem.

This is the part that gets skipped, and it is why some people have the same lock break two keys in a year.

A key that snapped in a lock that was turning smoothly is a fatigue failure and the lock is fine. A key that snapped in a lock that had been getting stiff broke because the lock was making the driver apply force it was never designed to take. Extracting the key without addressing the stiffness just resets the clock.

So a proper extraction visit ends with the cylinder assessed: cleaned and dry lubricated if it is dry or contaminated, rebuilt if the wafers or pins are worn, replaced if it is beyond that. On a car door or ignition, road salt and grit through a Mississauga winter is the usual culprit, and a flush and a dry lubricant is often all it takes.

The new key should also be cut from the vehicle's code or the lock's code rather than copied from the broken half, because the broken half is by definition a worn key and copying it reproduces the problem.

An ignition is the hardest extraction location, for two reasons. The keyway is deeper than a door lock, and the cylinder is often part way through its rotation when the key breaks, which means the wafers are partially engaged and clamping the blade.

That second point is why a broken ignition key sometimes needs the cylinder returned to the fully off position before anything will come out, and why forcing it is unproductive.

There is also the transponder to think about. On a modern vehicle the chip lives in the plastic head of the key, which is usually the half still in your hand. That is good news, because it means the chip survives and the replacement key can often reuse it, which removes the programming cost from the job entirely. Keep the broken head. Do not throw it away before the technician has seen it.

If the head was damaged or lost, the replacement key needs a new chip programmed to the immobiliser, which our transponder key page covers.