 The best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. All right, welcome, welcome to Unhinged with the DoorDork where door hardware nerds get together to knock and to slam on different door fell installs, code violations, all of the above. We learn, we laugh, and sometimes we do cry. And Alan, I think I've got a couple of tear drinkers for you today. So hold it back, be strong, be strong for me. But most importantly, we have fun while we dork out on some doors and learn a little bit why we go. Today, we do have a very special guest, Mr. Alan Lilly. For those who don't know, Alan Lilly has been like one of my first people that have been commenting and engaging on my DoorDork posts from the beginning. So he's like OG door hardware nerd. And I know in his job right now, he's not technically a door hardware nerd, but in his previous life, he handled a lot of hardware. Alan, why don't you jump on, say hello, introduce yourself and tell us a fun fact. My name is Alan, I'm from Ontario and I live for the rest of the world. I'm about a couple of hours outside of Toronto. It's the easiest way to describe that. It's kind of the point, partway between Toronto and Detroit is kind of the easy way to punch on the map. 20-ish years in the door industry, door hardware industry in various capacities. Division 8, Division 10, Installer, did some specification, did some sales. But bulk of my career, I was a locksmith or I am a locksmith, pulled a couple of certifications up in the U.S., one in Europe, one in Ontario, went through a whole ton of training. They don't care much for European hardware, it's all upside down backwards and some of the drives on the left, I just don't understand. But fun fact about me, when I was a kid, I learned how to fly, how to fly and fly as I was a kid in America. So get towed up in an airplane and then they release the tow rope and we just kind of, that controlled fall all the way down. They buzz light here, it's not flying, it's just falling with style. So that was kind of my fun fact. We always said that a good landing is one where you can walk away and a great landing is one where the plane can be reused and fortunately for me, all of the times that I landed, somebody else got in and went right back up. So I'll take those words. Yeah, you fell with style and survived. That's- And did it again. And did it again. And did it again on purpose. On purpose is the big part. Oh, well, it's wonderful to have you. I think you are being a little humble with the amount of hardware and knowledge that you have. I often reach out to you, I consider myself the door dork, but you are like a whole another level. And my specialty is knowing people like you that actually knows the answer. So then I reach out to you. That's pretty good. It wasn't all that long ago that I called you and said, hey, I don't know how to solve this problem, help me out. Okay, so there's some ebb and flow. There's some ebb and flow, but I've learned a lot from you, just commenting on my posts. So thank you. I appreciate all the insight that you have given me. Honestly, it's so much fun. I absolutely love that. The thing I always enjoyed about door hardware, I kind of fell into it by accident when I was a kid, when I was a teenager in my early 20s. And what I always loved about it is that it's always a different challenge. And depending on how you intend to use that door, you can solve the same polynomial door in the same opening, same type of building a hundred times. Every one of those doors, you can use a little bit differently and you can then specify, I think, and you can do the same thing even with keys, right? We had a really fun time, restaurant, many, many weeks ago and had two owners. And we were trying to figure out how people, owners happy. Well, my office has to work on my key and nobody else can have access to it. My office has to work on my key and nobody else can have access to it. And I will spare some of the details because it's a lot of math, but basically what I did was I made great, great, great, great master system, eliminated the top two tiers so that each owner had a key that worked both of their houses and everything in the restaurant except each other's office. Wow. Wait. And they all had to carry one, they only just had to carry one key. So they had one key, so each owner had one key that would open their office and everything in the restaurant and his office and everything in the restaurant and their own houses, but not each other's houses, not each other's house. Wow. That's a mind puzzle right there. That's like so. There was a lot of math. Yeah. That's some inception kind of thing. A grand master system within a grand master system. Yeah. And it would have been so much easier like now, medicals got their XT is it? And it would have been so much easier to program or even a cyber key or whatever, right? But there are electronic options now that would make that so much easier, but at the time it was, that wasn't the option. Just deny access. Yeah, Alan, why didn't you just deny access? Yeah. Just every time you charge a key, it changes who can get where. But like those systems are great, right? It makes it so much simpler now. But at the time that didn't exist, one of the things we always learned was like key in the building, not key in the people. That was very much key in the people and I was lucky that it was, you know, we were talking about like 15 doors, otherwise it would have been an absolute nightmare. That's kind of mind blowing to think about. That's really impressive. I've only dabbled in master key systems and I've only designed a handful of them and it's a lot of work. It's a lot of math. Then math was not my strong suit growing up. So. It's all even numbers. Yeah. If you do it, it's all even numbers. For good software platforms now. Cause that. Well, there's that too. A big difference. Well, when I learned to do it like, you know, there was that one out there, you know, I think each can see still makes like the same program that hasn't been updated since about 1997. But the locksmith shops that I did my apprenticeship in didn't have computers. Everything was done manually. So like, it was, you know, graph paper and a calculator doing your math to key systems. I was fortunate I worked. So I worked with some just fantastic people that were really good at the job. And so there wasn't anything that I was lacking. It was just a lot of work, right? Now you put it in your parameters, you press go, you press any of the spits and all the numbers for you. But, you know, I'm really not that old but it wasn't all that long ago that you would do that all manually. Yeah. Industries come a long way. Long way in a very short time. Again, one of those things I love about the industry is that one of the guys I used to work with on the locksmith shop, his dad started it. He worked for it. He said, his neighbor was a plumber and the most exciting thing in the plumbing world time. Remember talking about the late 90s or 2000s? The most exciting thing in the plumbing world was going from copper pipe to plastic. Now that's innovation. I think the innovation that has happened in door hardware in 10 years and 20 years and 30 years, right? Like think about all the things that changed. It used to be that you had two screwdriver's now set out and you could do whatever you wanted. And just the way that hardware has changed for the concept of just the electrification of hardware alone is an entirely different specialty. It's an entirely different job than what it was really not all that long ago. Yeah, it was kids' lifetime. Like 10 years ago, electrified hardware was maybe 5% of all openings and now it's getting closer to like 30 to 40. And pretty soon like everything's just gonna be connected, right? It's just gonna be the default instead of the exception, right? There was a time when it was like the super high security openings and the super sensitive buildings and it was like insurance companies and things. They were the ones that were doing this electrified hardware and really crazy. And then now like you're putting them on everything because everybody wants to be on a trail of reliability for time and attendance. And there's so many other advantages that we've kind of gone, well, wait a second. If we do this everywhere, it makes our day a whole lot better. Yeah, truth. Well, wow, welcome. Glad to have you on the show again. Thank you for joining us. Mia, why don't you hop on and say hello? And I think you might have a fun fact as well. Yeah, so Alan, welcome. I like your connection. It shows the power of networking. Also door hardware nerds for life. You cannot escape us. So just from what I thought I was in, something back in. Pull me back in. My fun fact and you'll notice that Benji's and mine, I guess are a little themed. So I've been teaching myself, I guess homesteading type stuff. I also, I like to pick up hobbies and maybe, maybe I'll do that as a series of fun facts. So I've been teaching myself things like canning this past year. I've canned things like dandelion jelly. We picked the dandelions in our front yard, did that. I made my own homemade cranberry juice as well, which that is fantastic. If you like cranberry juice, highly recommend. It's not that cranberry cocktail stuff. No, no, like cranberries. Your stuff, ooh. Yeah, so. So do you have like a giant bog where you just grow cranberries? No, that, no, but since I live in the Northeast, we are debating on when we go to the Cape this summer, Cape Cod, stopping at one of the bogs and grabbing cranberries and then canning them when we get home. That's definitely a fun fact. Yeah, homestead, I love it. Dandelion jelly, like what does it taste like? It's actually like honey. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, you're like, what would it taste like? I only expected it like that because the person that I learned it from said that. But yeah, it's like honey. So like you'd toast a little bread, a little butter, dandelion jam, it's almost like you're drizzling honey on top of it, really good. Which dandelions can be very bitter also. So it's weird that you're able to extract and get the sweet out of it. Yeah, the greens. Greens, the greens are the flowers. The flowers. So you're just taking the yellows. Oh, okay. Yeah, just you want the petals and essentially you make a tea with it, right? You let it steep in the water, you make a tea and then you oil the tea down, you know, and you add your pectin in and everything and then you can it, so. At least there you have, you do have the nectar. There is some nectar in the flower somewhere. Okay, that makes more sense. I was thinking like, you're just grabbing dandelion flower leaves, like making a salad. Yeah, no, you can, but yeah, you could use the other part of it for a salad, right, because the greens are also good and you can make up straight up tea. Like you don't even need to go to the second part of the process. Yeah, no, actually I've had dandelion tea before. It's good. Yeah, you know, interesting things over here. We've made other stuff, not with homemade ingredients, but I'll buy herbs. We've made lotion bars, you know, with the kids. It's a fun experience. We make our own fire starters, so. Yeah, so we do all sorts of stuff. So homesteading, my fun fact. Hello everyone, by the way, hi. Oh, it's you too. My fun fact is I like to tell people that I grew up on what I think of like a mini farm. We had this large garden, I guess it's like a farm, but we didn't really sell any of our produce. We just grew it and literally put my sweat and blood and tears into making that happen. So when I was a kid, I despised it. I hated the idea of waking up the crack of dawn before school to go out and weed and hoe and till and all the good old gardening stuff. But when I grew up into an adult, I realized it's actually a pretty good superpower to learn how to work hard, you know, like that hard work that I learned back then, if you reply it to anything you do, it goes a long way, right? Hard work works harder than talent, or if talent doesn't work or something. What's the, what's the saying? I work beats talent when talent doesn't work. Yeah, we grew everything from like corn, beans, the potatoes to Brussels sprouts. Actually, we had talked beforehand about Brussels sprouts, little side note here. We grew Brussels sprouts one season and bugs got to them, but because we were so frugal, we didn't want anything to go to waste. And so we actually cooked up the Brussels sprouts with the bugs inside of them. We did our best to clean them, but it was just added extra protein. Got a little protein, a little crunch, a little touch, a little little seasoning on there. No, but I still have siblings to this day that will never touch a Brussels sprout, partially because of that trauma. I love Brussels sprouts, but I also like deep frying them with some salt and some garlic and stuff. That's the way. So you need the crunch now. Yeah. What bugs did you get? Was it aphids or was it something else? Yeah, it was aphids. Just the little tiny bugs that were, yeah. We even like had ladybugs. Like we would go to a farm and grab ladybugs and release them into our garden to help with that. But apparently those bugs really liked those Brussels sprouts that year. So we have a hydroponic garden in the kitchen and we're about to come to the end of the season because as soon as it gets warm, we get aphids all over everything in the kitchen. Like in the garden, not in the rest, it doesn't spread to anything else. But when it gets warmer, even though I have like AC on and everything, I can't keep the aphids out of the hydroponic garden. Really? They're fine. Everything's fine outside, but inside the house, like we can only grow from like November to March. Wow, that surprises me. Yeah. If you want to be featured on a future episode of Unhinged or if you have some pictures to submit, you can leave us a note below or you can email me at Mia at doorhardwarenerds.com.