1997 Mazda Protege
Key Replacement - Save vs Dealer in Ventura County

1997 Mazda Protege Metal Key Replacement - Fast, Affordable & Professional

I was working up near Mission Canyon on a Tuesday afternoon when a guy flagged me down from a gas station pulloff. He'd been driving for a rideshare company between runs and his key blade had snapped clean -- about a third of it still sitting in the door lock, the rest in his hand.

He'd already called another locksmith. That guy said the lock was going to need to be drilled out and replaced. New cylinder, labor, the whole thing. The number he quoted was not small.

I looked at the break. It was a clean snap, right at the shoulder, from years of that key getting yanked out at odd angles. The wafers inside were fine. I used a broken key extractor to work the fragment out without touching the wafer stack, then decoded the lock while I had it accessible.

Cut a new key to the decoded depths, tested it in the door, tested it in the ignition. Smooth both ways on the first try.

The cylinder never came out. The car looked exactly the same when I drove off. He was back on the road in about twenty minutes, and he paid a fraction of what the other guy wanted to charge him just for the drilling.

Destructive entry is a last resort. On a lock this age, nine times out of ten, extraction and decode is the right call first.

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