Car Key Repair How To

If your reading this, you’re not alone! We have 1000 visits to our website every day looking for help car key repair and general help.

As well as this, every month we take hundreds of calls from around the country from car owners that are struggling with a broken car key or broken van key.

Things have got  a lot worse over the last few years with keys falling to pieces. Surely this isn’t right, or fair.

We’ve written at length about car key repair techniques, both on YouTube and in this blog. So at last, here is our our 5 step guide to fixing your own car key.

Important Car Key Repair Warning

Although we believe that most car keys can be fixed, there are a few basic rules that you should thing about first.

Do you have a spare key? 

Most car keys are glued together, so you’ll need to break them open in order to complete your car key repair. Electronics are delicate and accidents happen. If you damage the key when you open it, you may end up with a car that won’t start!

It might not even be your fault. It could be that the immobiliser chip circuit is already faulty, but when you open it up, it fails altogether. We also see this occasionally at our shop in Lincoln.

Do you have the tools you need?

Most of the time you’ll only need very basic tools. The most important tool we use for car key repair are called circlip pliers. Like in the photo below. They’re really cheap and will help you so much.

Buy these key opening pliers on Amazon – Click Here

Here is a short video showing how useful they are, we couldn’t do our job without them!

Swapping your Car Key Blade

If you’re planning to swap the blade over from your old broken car key to the new case, a word of caution. It’s not always straight forward.

You’d think that you could pop it out, then fit in easily. However, you have to remember that the new case has been made in a different factory to the original dealer key.

Hopefully this photo shows how the tang, the part that gets held by the key, is different in the original at the top, and the repair case at the bottom.

If you want to swap the blade as part of your car key repair, you’ll need to modify the tang with a small needle file.

Buy Needle File set on Amazon – Click Here

The other thing that will help is a pin punch, or something similar. The one we recommend is made from steel and is a similar size as the pin you are trying to knock out. You still need to make sure the pin punch doesn’t get stuck in the case!

We think the easiest thing to do is to get the blade cut which should cost you around £10. However, some of the big national companies refuse to do this, so you may need to phone around.

Top tips for a successful Car Key Repair.

Step One – Buy the Correct Car key Repair Case

So we have a few tips on choosing the correct case. You will find them on ebay and Amazon. They range from £1.99 – £20 and high price is not always a sign of high quality unfortunately.

The main problem with choosing a repair case is getting the correct one, especially with Peugeot and Citroen cases. We’ve made a video which shows how to get the correct case which already has nearly 200,000 views on YouTube, so hopefully this will help.

Links to repair cases can be found at the end of the article

Ok, so you have the tools and the case. Now we’ll show you what to do.

Step Two  – Get the Locks Turning !

Most important. We recommend that you get the new key case turning the locks of your car, BEFORE you start breaking the old car key open.

At our shop, or through our postal repair service, we often hear tales of car owners swapping the electronics over, but struggling with the blade. They end up with a repaired key, that won’t turn in the locks! So they can’t use the car key.

You don’t want that.

So get the blade cut, or swap the blade over first.

Find out How To Fix it Before starting. Click to find a video to help you. 

Watch a video or read one of our articles. We have over 160 videos on our channel so you’ll find one for most car key repair jobs. We also have a Learning Centre, that has hundreds of articles that will help.

Buy a good quality Key Battery

We see so many problems with keys, and sometimes all that’s needed is a good quality key battery. If you have one without a brand on, throw it in the bin. You really need to be sticking to well known brands that you can trust.

The most common sizes are

Most Vauxhall, Volkswagen, Seat and Skoda keys use CR2032 Batteries

New Fords use  CR2025 batteries, along with

Older Peugeot and Citroen keys, with blades that do not fold, use CR2016 batteries

Most Peugeot and Citroen Flip Keys Use CR1620 Batteries

Lastly BMW cars mostly use CR2450 batteries, which are a bit unusual and not always available is normal shops.

And that’s it. If you have everything listed, you’ll be able to fix you key.

Are there keys where a car key repair should be avoided?

Have a quick look at how hard we rate the following keys. We rate them as simply ‘easy‘, ‘medium‘ and  ‘hard‘

Easy – Have a go without worry

Vauxhall Insignia, Astra J, Corsa E, Mokka, etc

Vauxhall Astra H, Corsa D and Corsa C

Medium – No soldering needed

Hard – Risk of the car not starting afterwards, or soldering needed

Ford Transit and Custom

Volkswagen, Seat and Skoda Keys after 2010 (One Piece Key)

Good Luck and we hope this has helped

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