The Lord of the Keys

The Lord of the Keys

Around 30 years ago, Egyptian-born Awad Abd El Nasser, who completed his training as a mechanical engineer in Cairo, set foot in Austria and turned his passion for restoring old furniture into a career. Due to increasing demand, at the beginning of the new millennium he specialized in historical locks, keys and fittings for furniture and vintage cars. The inscription “Antik Beschläge” is emblazoned above the shop windows of his workshop shop at Heinestrasse 27 in Vienna. The entrance is tiny, all the walls are paved with blackboards, and tens of thousands of blanks and finished keys hang on metal hooks. In the workshop behind the booth there is creative chaos in which only the key master knows his way around. Using highly specialized mechanical and computer-controlled machine tools, he produces both apartment keys and furniture keys as well as ignition keys for cars and motorcycles. Most of the time he clamps the appropriate blank into a milling machine, selects the correct code number and lets the machine run. The trick is that each key requires its own chuck and a special milling cutter, and many keys, especially older ones, have to be machined by hand.

Key for exotics

Thanks to his good contacts in the antiques scene, key master Nasser has been keeping up to date with current bankruptcies of key companies from all over the world for many years and buys up the blanks from the bankruptcies in Germany, the Czech Republic, France and Italy. Thanks to this wise foresight, his small shop is now the first stop in Austria for ignition keys for historic vehicles. Some classic car owners visit him with the ignition locks removed and ask him to make the matching key. He gets most of his customer contacts through recommendations from the classic car scene and from colleagues from other locksmith services who are overwhelmed by some of their customers' specific requests. The impressively extensive list of cars and motorcycles for which Nasser can make the right ignition keys using original blanks can be found on his company website www.schluesselzentrum-wien.at