Pexto #5 and Company Info

Pete

I have a Pexto #5 mortise lock and I would like to know the dates this lock was made. Any info on the Pexto company would be great also.

Thanks in advance!

Pschiffe

Pete wrote
I have a Pexto #5 mortise lock and I would like to know the dates this lock was made. Any info on the Pexto company would be great also.

Thanks in advance!

Pexto was an acronym for The Peck, Stow & Wilcox Co., a manufacturer of hand tools and sheet metal machinery located in Southington, CT. Apparently they may have made locks at some point in time, here is a link to a brief history of the company:
Rose Antique Tools old tools and history
Independent Lock Company (Ilco), Catalog No. 12, 1941; shows a #1117 key blank for “Pexto”, no longer extant; so presumably the locks may have been made in that era. Other blanks that were equivalent are 60C Keil, 698 Niessen and 2607H Graham; all also obsolete. Hope this helps a little.

Pete Schifferli

[unknown]

Pete

Thanks for the info (again) Pschiffe! Hmmm? The door and lock seem to me to be a bit older then 1940 ish. But why do I think that? The number of coats of paint? I don’t know much about dating doors, locks, or paint for that matter. I was thinking 1850 to 1900 just by the rust and door style.

Dean Nickel

You have to keep in mind that it takes several years for a key blank to make it into a key catalog and it can stay in the key catalogs for decades after. Like General Lock co has not been in business since Schlage bought them back in the 1960’s but the key blanks are still in the Ilco key catalog. So you really can’t use a key catalog for more than saying it was before a point in time.

Pschiffe

Halflock wrote
You have to keep in mind that it takes several years for a key blank to make it into a key catalog and it can stay in the key catalogs for decades after. Like General Lock co has not been in business since Schlage bought them back in the 1960’s but the key blanks are still in the Ilco key catalog. So you really can’t use a key catalog for more than saying it was before a point in time.

The Ilco Catalog No. 7 from 1926 does not show the 1117 for Pexto, so I am comfortable with dating that Pexto key around the 1930s, but that’s only an educated guess. My two cents.

Pete Schifferli

[unknown]

Pete

You guys know too much! Thanks for researching that Pschiffe. In the historic research I do, the one thing everyone is careful about is to say that the item can’t be older then the date it was made. So just because a lock was invented in say 1900, it could have been put onto the door anytime after that. Arggg! So it sounds like Pexto didn’t make locks for that long of a period, or a huge number of them weren’t made? (Just by the lack of info I am finding on Pexto here and everywhere else online.)

77dk

Hello, my house was built in 1927, and the front door has a Pexto mortise lock that may be original to the house. I just took it out and cleaned it and got the latch working smoothly - still works great, nice smooth action (well, the knobs/ latch, I don’t have a key for the lock part.) There were still wood shavings in the mortise opening from the day it was installed!