by lorenzolrom » 8 Mar 2021 10:08
I’m curious if anyone here has worked for or with Best when designing master systems, and has any insight into how they go about coding keys. I’ve read that they often designate the TMK as “GM”, regardless of how many levels the system has, and then designate masters with either letters or numbers, subs with letters, resulting in changes like 1F-3 or BA-1.
In the field I’ve encountered some codes that break with that, like C3A-6 (which almost looks like SKCS if they iterated A-Z at least twice), “PM” for the TMK, with every key in the system being pre-fixed by “P” (e.g. PAC-1), a master stamped CA that was not under a master C, it just so happened that the building was abbreviated to “CA” (and in that same system there WAS a “C” master for a building whose name started with C)
As far as I can tell all the systems except “PM” were definitely generated by the factory, “PM” may have been field work or a third party because of some peculiarities with the way the CT keys were bitted (one cut on CT matched the TMK, and I presume to avoid issues with the CT operating a cylinder one cut broke odd/even parity).
I’ve also seen cores in the field that were stamped along the lines of “PA-36A”, which were cross-keyed, but in the same system they were using “X” like I would expect, (even saw a few “XX” cores), so who knows what was going on there.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the answer is “Best will do whatever the customer wants”, maybe some of you have seen your own wacky stamping conventions to add…
