One piece of the skeleton key to a bedroom door broke off in the lock. It’s deadbolted shut, and the hinges are on the inside. Not only do we not have a spare key, it’s a weird old non-standard key. Do we have to bust through the door?
Never mind, climbed in through the window and unlocked it! Time to replace the lock. That happened to be the room where all the Christmas presents were hidden!
A mod may lock this if they don’t want people to waste their time on this.
For future reference, two ways I have heard of dealing with this:
- a thin rod that will fit into the keyhole, with sticky bubble gum or similar on the end to attach to the broken-off key.
- a strong magnet, to attract the broken-off key. (Old skeleton keys are generally iron, so attracted by magnets. And though the rest of the lock is probably also iron, it can’t move like the key.
I would have used needle nose pliers to fish it out and then take the piece to a locksmith to duplicate.