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!

Deadbolts for the Dummy Apartment Dweller

Gonna cut a hole for that bolt with a
chisel? Really?

The biographies that contributors to eHow submitted had to meet certain standards: they needed to be of a certain length and demonstrate some of the writer's qualifications, whether as a tradesperson or a journalist (which, according to the eHow rubric, meant a writer was qualified to discuss any subject). They did not, however, have to be verified. If the bios were verified, we wonder if Emily Beach would have been able to write "How to Install an Extra Lock on an Apartment Door"¹ for HomeSteady.com (especially while calling herself Bambi Turner).

Deadbolts for a Dummy DIY Locksmith

What screws, Josh?

Some of our research staffers are fairly athletic, while others get more exercise jumping to conclusions than in any other endeavor. One of the latter turned up an interesting fact the other day while looking into the biography of eHowian Josh Nuttall, a freelancer she found attempting to write the post "How to Disassemble a Deadbolt Lock"¹ at Hunker.com (moved there from eHow.com by Leaf Group).

Home Security for Dummies

Deadbolt lock

We're not sure whether it's worse for freelancers to dump out misconceptions and bad facts because they don't understand the topic (and there's a lot of that) or for them to offer up "advice" that's incomplete or plain old wrong. Well, there's advice that's stupid and there's advice that's dangerously stupid – and the latter is perhaps the worst...

A case in point: HubPages.com contributor John Albu, writing on the topic "How to keep your home safe from burglars?"¹ Is it just us, or is that question mark a dead giveaway that the content will be crap? Whatever the case, John's sole advice involved locks. No alarms, dogs, security lights, or any of the other advice you can find at thousands of sites run by law enforcement. No, just locks: