About
Two Pawtucket counters, the same shop, since 2001.
A Better Locksmith was founded in 2001, and everything on this site still traces back to that one Pawtucket storefront. It is a local, family-owned business, not a franchise, and it has spent more than two decades doing the same three kinds of work: getting people back into a home, a business, or a car.
The work has always split three ways, and it still does today. Residential jobs are doors, deadbolts, and the day someone moves into a new place and wants every lock answering to one key. Commercial jobs are keying schedules, master systems, and hardware for a building rather than a single door. Automotive jobs are lost car keys, remotes, and proximity fobs, more often than not for someone who has lost every key they own, not just one. The full list of what the shop does is on the services page, but the split has stayed the same since 2001. Every estimate is free, given on the phone before anyone drives out.
On the hardware side, the shop has stuck to brands it trusts rather than carrying everything on the shelf: Schlage, Kwikset, and Arrow for homes, and Best, Schlage, and Arrow interchangeable cores for commercial doors. Manufacturer warranties are honored on anything installed here, and the shop is bonded and insured. For automotive work it is associated with NASTF, the National Automotive Service Task Force, the legitimate channel that gives a locksmith access to vehicle key and security information.
Military, police, and fire discounts apply to residential work, and senior discounts apply to automotive work. Ask when you call, rather than after the job is done.
Behind the counter
Newport Avenue, mostly unchanged since 2001
That is the shop itself: the key-cutting machines, the wall of blanks, the counter where a job actually gets quoted, and the security cameras watching all of it. An original key gets cut from scratch here, or a lost car key gets duplicated, code permitting, at the same counter where a residential re-key or a commercial IC core order gets written up.
Customers keep naming the same technician. Donna DiFilippo wrote that Marcel took ownership of her key fob replacement and programming with a calmness she hardly expected. Luis Herrera and Jeff Cormier both called his re-keying and deadbolt work professional and excellent, and Peter and Kathy M, working through two of their own doors, described him as unusually kind, intelligent, and polite. None of that is written by the shop. It is what four separate people chose to put in writing after the work was done.
Two counters
578 Newport Avenue and 314 Power Road, four minutes apart
One business, two Pawtucket counters. Newport Avenue is the main shop and the number on the sign. Either counter can take a re-key, a car key, or a commercial hardware order, and either number reaches the same business.