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I got a Yale YRD110-ZW-619 keyless deadbolt through work right at the end of November and was tasked with getting it installed. I’ve done a fair bit of fiddling with the locks around here, so I figured that it wouldn’t be any problem whatsoever. Sometimes I’m wrong. This time I was wrong.

One evening at the very start of December I excited busted open the packaging to see what I needed to do. It was straightforward: put the thing in the thing and then attach another thing to the second thing. Easy. So I went over to the exiting deadbolt and ripped it out of the door. Then I came over with the new stuff to put in the first piece… and immediately discovered it didn’t work.

Deadbolts come in a few different varieties. The first incompatibility had to do with the actual bit that sticks out of the door to lock into the frame. These mechanisms are designed to either fit into a little recess on the edge of the door or to just sit nearly flush. A lot of deadbolts can be configured either way. If it’s going to sit in a recessed area, there’s a metal plate you can attach to the end. This image kind of sums it up:

Unfortunately for me, the new deadbolt was the kind that fit in a recessed area and had the metal plate. The door didn’t have that recessed area (the existing deadbolt was one of those “drive in” types). So I would need to chisel out part of the door to make room for the metal place. That’s not too bad, but our door is weird. It’s not a standard wood door; it’s steel. So I would need to chisel out through steel. I wasn’t a huge fan of that option, so I contacted the manufacturer to see about getting a drive in style deadbolt without the plate that would work with the rest of the lock. They pointed me to one they offered, and $12 later I had a deadbolt that would work! Yay!

I got delayed a week due to shipping and whatnot, but after the new deadbolt came in I door the door apart a second time to get this thing installed. The new deadbolt worked OK. It would at least go in the door, but it stuck out just a hair too much. I had to remove the little metal plate the sliding bolt goes into for everything to bit, but I made it work.

The next step was to put the keypad and backing plate on each side of the door. The front and back of the deadbolt slide into a hole in the door with a shaft that goes through the part that actually slides in and out. You then attach the two pieces with a couple screws. Maybe an image will help:

The new lock worked the same way. It just had a little more going on with each half. So I took the first half and shoved it at the door hole. It wouldn’t fit. Turns out that deadbolts come in two standard sizes: 1-1/2″ across and 2-1/8″ across. The hole was 1-1/2″. The new deadbolt was 2-1/8″. *sigh* Fine. So I needed a bigger hole. But the stupid door was steel. So to make a bigger hole I’d need to drill through steel. *sigh*

And to make matters worse, I wasn’t just drilling a hole, I was enlarging an existing hole. I have to admit that this stumped me for some time. I really didn’t want to deal with it to begin with, and when I finally started looking into HOW to do it, I found a couple different approaches.

The first was to just use a deadbolt installation jig and drill through using a standard saw bit. Incredibly, I happened to already have that. Specifically this one from Black & Decker. I bought it a while back because it was the only thing the store had for a saw blade and I just wanted to drill a big hole for running cables through our entertainment center. Lucky me!

Unfortunately (that’s becoming a common word in this story), that jig is an absolute piece of junk. It doesn’t stay in place worth a darn. As soon as I fired up the drill it wiggled right off center.

My next option was to get a hole saw enlarger that would have a piece that fit in the existing hole to guide it, then a second piece that drilled the new sized hole. That was a good option, but I didn’t want to have to wait for delivery or really go anywhere to get one. The local hardware store that’s just down the street didn’t carry any. Instead, I got some scrap wood from the local hardware store and made my own jig! I just drilled the correct size hole in a piece of wood, then clamped that on the door centered with the existing hole. That actually worked as a guide.

So then we get to the actual drilling. Hole saws are multipurpose. You can drill through steel with them. They just don’t work as fast as you might expect. I had several false starts where I didn’t think it was doing anything, I got dejected, gave up, reassembled the door, then decided I really needed to suck it up, pulled apart the door, and retried drilling.

It was an ordeal. However, with *much* patience and several YouTube videos on how to drill through metal, I managed to get both the inside and outside of the door to the proper hole size. THANK HEAVENS! I grabbed the two pieces and confirmed that they now indeed fit through the hole and would connect. Score. I grabbed the sliding lock part and put that in the hole, got the exterior part of the lock slid on, placed the interior backing plate, and tried to get the bolts that connect everything together in place.

Yes, “tried”. Unfortunately (*sigh*), the two halves didn’t quite line up through the middle part. The middle part that actually slides in and out was just a hair too high and juuuuust a bit too far out from the outside edge of the door. Dang it. It looked like I needed to convince it to go just a bit further into the door for everything to line up. But hole in the metal edge of the door was just a little tool small. Sick of drilling, I busted out my file and just started going to town at it manually, filing down the edges to enlarge the hole. It took quite a while, but I finally managed to get it big enough to push the deadbolt in the litttttttle bit it needed to line up.

And with that last bit of effort, everything went together smoothly and the stupid thing was installed. This was all last weekend, so it was a good 3 weeks between getting the lock and actually managing to install it. It vexed me greatly at every step of the way. Even writing all this up has vexed me. So instead of some nice little summary that wraps everything up and provides some kind of closure, I’m just going to give up and quit writing.

I got a little depressed the other day when I thought that Uber was defaulting my rating of a driver to 5 stars if I didn’t do anything. After thinking about it more I don’t think that’s actually the case, but it did get me mulling about how 5 stars is the new average. I looked into Uber specifically a bit and found that they require different minimum ratings in each city. Don’t meet the rating requirement and you’re kicked out. A couple of cities popped up in my search. In Miami you need to maintain an average rating of 4.3 stars. In Johannesburg it’s around 4.2 stars.

The idea is to encourage drivers to provide exceptional service, but what it really means is that “average” is 5 stars. Amazon has a similar problem. If you’ve bought a product from a third-part seller you’ve likely experienced the scads of followup emails begging and pleading that if you had any problems to contact them and let them fix it before leaving anything less than a 5 star review.

There’s no longer a spread of ratings. If I rate something 3, that should be average. But that’s not how a 3 is perceived. A 3 means that the thing was barely functional. I wouldn’t really have an issue with this if it didn’t mean that I’ve lost the ability to rate something as truly exceptional. If I give my Uber driver 3 stars I’m working toward putting him out of a job. That’s just mean. So if they do anything from “OK” to “Best driver in the world”, all I can do is give a 3. If an Amazon product doesn’t get a 5 star review it might not sell as well… and I’m OK with that. But I personally run a risk of getting harassment from sellers if I list anything less then 5 stars. That’s not OK. (And as a side note – you can report that kind of behavior to Amazon Customer Service.)

The only place where I feel that things are actually 1-5 stars is Netflix, and that’s only because I’m getting personalized recommendations. My 1-5 rating is mapped onto other user’s ratings of any number to generate my expected score. It works pretty well. Most movies I see from Netflix are a solid 3. Some are 2s, some are 4s, some are 5s, and a small number are 1s (I tend to self-select away from watching really really bad movies).

I guess there’s really no point to all this beyond my general annoyance. I just felt like I had to share.