Kwikset Deadbolt Removal, the Clueless Approach

deadbolt with set screw in thumb lever

The freelancers who so often pretended to be helping people at eHow.com had a nasty habit of confusing the specific with the general. Of course, if you know nothing about the topic at hand, it's pretty difficult to believe that there is more than one way to skin any cat. Take Brad Maddy, for instance: the young PT probably had no idea that the instructions he found for his Hunker.com post, "How to Remove a Kwikset Deadbolt," weren't the definitive guide... and it didn't help that he cited an eHow video as one of his references!

Brad's chief problem appears to be that he mashed up three different sets of instructions in one post, unaware that they were (apparently) for different versions of Kwikset deadbolts. Wait: he didn't know that not all deadbolts are the same? What a surprise!

Whatever the case, here's how Brad said to start:

"Pry off the inside deadbolt cover using a small flat-blade screwdriver. Remove the pin that holds the thumb lever in place with an appropriately sized Allen wrench. Then pry off the lever and inside cover to access the mounting screws."

In our experience, that's bogus. Apparently, some of his readers thought so, too, at least based on a comment that appeared in 2011 (and then disappeared):

"'Remove the pin that holds the thumb lever in place' -- What in blazes does that mean?? I'm driving myself crazy with this flat-head screwdriver. I got under the cover, but what is a pin? What is a thumb lever? Why doesn't anything move??"

Well, Brad's problem is that removing the set screw (aka "grub screw," which he calls a "pin") from the thumb lever is the first step, if and only if you have a single-cylinder deadbolt. It looks as though the part about prying off the cover goes with a double-cylinder deadbolt... Small wonder poor desertbeard couldn't follow his "instructions"!

Brad continued in that vein, telling folks to,

"Remove the two mounting screws from the interior cover using the Phillips screwdriver..."

...except that the bozo who added photos to Maddy's post in 2014 (Davina Calloway) used a photograph with the thumb lever still installed.
Once you get past the bogosity, the rest flows relatively smoothly. The problem, of course, is getting past the bogosity our Dumbass of the Day (and his photographer) introduced to the task.

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