We recently did a job for a business near Shelard Park off Ford Road in St Louis Park MN, which is actually isn’t far from our local store. (Here are the driving directions to our store) The building had an older commercial door with a basic push paddle exit device that wasn’t cutting it anymore. The business owner wanted better access control and asked us to replace it with a keypad entry lock. As you can see in the first photo below, the old push paddle hardware was outdated and didn’t give the owner any way to control who comes in and out.

This job was on a narrow-stile aluminum storefront door which is a very common door type you see on commercial buildings all over St Louis Park and the Twin Cities. Not every keypad lock fits these doors because the stile is much thinner than a regular wood or metal door. You need hardware made specifically for narrow-stile applications. For this install we went with an Alarm Lock Trilogy keypad lock. Alarm Lock is one of the best brands out there for commercial keypad entry, right up there with Kaba and Schlage. The Trilogy series is built for exactly this kind of doors and it gives you a numeric keypad, a lever handle, and a key override cylinder all in one unit.(which is mortise as you can see)

In the photos you can see the door after we removed the old hardware and prepped it for the new keypad lock. The existing cutouts in the stile needed some work to line up with the new Alarm Lock. We had to modify the prep on site to make sure everything fit tight and clean. This is the kind of thing that takes real experience to get right because if the holes are off even a little bit the lock wont sit flush and you will have problems down the road.