Quality of older and newer locks

[aviator151]

I was wondering what people thought about the quality of locks concerning their age. I noticed this because my parents have a filing cabinet that is around 30-40 years old and is a 4 tier Sears and Roebuck filing cabinet with a 4 pin tumbler, and from reading most things about newer filing cabinets they have cheap wafer locks. Has anyone else noticed a difference in quality with age?

A caveat: I'm not talking about specific advancements in technology, only about the craftsmanship and quality of the lock itself.

[digital_blue]

I think you can't devide technological advancements from lock quality. Overall, as tech has improved, it has become cheaper to machine products with far tighter tolerances. That, however, doesn't discount the fact that in this day and age there are many manufacturers that are willing to pump out shoddy products in the interest in saving pennies which, when extrapolated over mass-market quantities, makes them oodles of profit. So, my answer is that locks have both gotten better and worse with time. There is a wider variety of good quality, well machined locks at a respectable price, AND there is a wider variety of total junk that has been accepted into our Walmart culture.


db

[MrB]

When comparing new and old filing cabinets, you are actually considering the quality of the filing cabinet, not the lock. The filing cabinet manufacturer has a choice about which lock to fit. Just because they fitted a cheaper lock today than in yesteryear, it doesn't mean the lock decreased in quality of manufacture. It simply means they selected a different component.

Now if you find who made the lock from 40 years ago and see if they make the same lock today, then you would be comparing the quality of the lock itself between then and now.

[bigbike]

You really need to compare apple to apples when comparing locks. Newer cabinets may come with cheaper locks, but then again the steel used in the construction of the cabinet is also generally thinner. If you compare an old style padlock with a new one, even some of the better old padlocks do not compare (security wise) to some of the newer cheap models. If your compare wafer to wafer or pin to pin type locks you will find that the hardware generally is better on the newer locks because of tighter machining today (as well as other things).

I hope this help explain my reasoning.