Cabinet Locks

Abigail’s not quite a threat to herself with what’s in our cabinets and drawers, but she’s getting close so Jen passed the order to start getting things secured.

Me being a little on the handy side, Jen decided the frustratingly simple latch mechanisms weren’t going to work for us.

We needed something far more sophisticated and complicated to install. After reading many mixed reviews, she settled on the Safety 1st magnetic tot locks.  Basically the lock mounts on the backside of the cabinet door or inside the drawer. To disengage it, you wave a hand held magnet (i.e. key) over the area of the lock and the door or drawer is released. Pretty ingenious, but the instructions and reviews were murder. People had all kinds of problems lining them up (installing something on the inside of a cabinet door or drawer isn’t easy for sure) or getting the magnets to work through their wood surfaces.

I figured what the hell. I’d have a couple of cups of coffee and give them a try.

First challenge was getting the packaging open. Why the hell it had to be so secure and completely unusable once it was open I have no idea.

With the packaging all torn apart and pieces spilling everywhere, I tried reading the instructions. Ha! what a joke. Step 1, put part A here, then part B there. What the hell is part A and where is B? At this point Jen added many reviewers found the instructions in the package useless, but the ones online infinitely better. They were right. Quickly I was able to get down to business.

Here’s the latch from the inside of the cabinet.

Yep. Looks like a latch. The important point is there’s nothing to see on the outside. In addition to the 6 screws you see, I had to drill a 9/32 diameter hole in the center of it all in which an adjustable metal rod is inserted.The rod’s job is to transfer the magnetism from the “key” waved over the outside to the lock on the inside and disengage it.

The depth of the rod/hole is dependent on the thickness of your cabinets. Mine were 3/4″, so I drilled my hole just about 11/16″. Literally I could feel the bit moving under my finger from the other side. The other biggest complaint was the magnetism doesn’t transfer well. Making sure there was as little material between the face of the cabinet and the rod without drilling through it took care of that.

So on the outside all you see is this.

Not bad eh? And it works as good as it looks.

Now the drawer (I only did the knife drawer so far) was a different story. Same concept, but of course the opening for a drawer is significantly smaller than that of a cabinet.

Nothing but tiny screws and tiny spaces. It took significantly longer to do the drawer and I learned a few things along the way for the next ones. The drawer was also significantly thicker between the drawer face and the inside box I had nearly 1 3/8″ of wood. Again, I drilled my hole for the rod about 1 5/16″.

Here’s a quick video of how it works.

Slick huh?

Abigail’s not impressed.

She says she’ll have these things picked and drinking draino in no time.

– b