Medeco Maxum: The Deadbolt That Laughs at Kick-Ins.

Start with what makes the Maxum special as an object. Documented

• Solid brass construction throughout, not zinc with a brass finish.
• ANSI/BHMA Grade 1 — the top residential grade, and the same designation carried by the Schlage B60N at a sixth of the price, which tells you something about what a grade does and doesn't capture.
• UL 437 listed cylinder and ANSI/BHMA A156.30 — high-security cylinder certifications, covered in Chapter 3.
• Hardened anti-drill inserts and anti-pry construction designed specifically against attacks on the lock body. Manufacturer
• Fits doors 1-3/8″ to 2-1/2″, 2-1/8″ crossbore, 1″ edge bore, backsets 2-3/8″ or 2-3/4″.

This is genuinely excellent hardware. Against someone attacking the lock — drilling the cylinder, wrenching the housing, prying at the bolt — the Maxum is about as good as residential hardware gets.

About that headline

This page has been called "the deadbolt that laughs at kick-ins" since we published it, and it's worth being straight about what that can and can't mean, because our own frame guide spends five thousand words proving that no deadbolt stops a kick.

Both things are true, and the distinction matters more than almost anything else on this page:

If you take one action from this review, it's that one. Everything else is refinement.

Every ordinary lock asks one question of each pin: is it at the right height? Medeco's design asks two. Documented

• Elevation, as usual. Each pin must be lifted to the shear line, exactly as in a standard pin tumbler.
• Plus rotation. Medeco pins have angled tips and chisel points. The key's angled cuts twist each pin to a specific angle as well as lifting it — axial rotation, which is Medeco's core patent going back generations.
• A sidebar checks the second answer. Sitting at three o'clock in the plug, it can only retract when a gate on every rotated pin lines up with it. Height alone gets you nothing.

Later generations add more. The M3 introduced a spring-biased slider beneath the sidebar: in its default state the slider arms physically block the sidebar from retracting, and a protrusion on the side of the key must push it clear. Documented That's a third condition on top of elevation and rotation.

The engineering is real. A picker has to hold every pin at the correct height and the correct angle simultaneously, with a sidebar that gives far less feedback than a shear line does. It is a fundamentally harder problem than a four-pin Master Lock, and it isn't close.

Worth knowing when you shop: the Maxum is a deadbolt line, and it ships with different Medeco cylinder generations depending on the SKU — Original, Biaxial, M3 and later. The generation matters, for reasons that become clear in Chapter 4. Check what you're actually buying.

UL 437 is the American standard for high-security key locks, and unlike ANSI/BHMA grading it is explicitly an attack standard rather than a durability one. Certification requires the cylinder to resist picking, drilling and forcing for specified durations under laboratory attack by testers who are trying to open it. Documented

That's a meaningfully different claim from Grade 1. As we've written before, ANSI/BHMA grading measures cycles and impact on the lock; it does not certify that skilled people failed to open it. UL 437 does. Very few residential locks carry it, and it is the single best shorthand on a spec sheet for "this cylinder is in a different class."

And UL 437 covers the cylinder. It does not cover your door, your jamb, or the screws holding the strike — the same gap that runs through the whole frame argument.

Here is the part that separates this review from every other write-up of this lock, and it's not something we discovered — it's been public since 2008 and simply doesn't get mentioned when people recommend Medeco.

In 2008, security researchers Marc Weber Tobias and Tobias Bluzmanis published Open in Thirty Seconds: Cracking One of the Most Secure Locks in America. Documented It was the output of an eighteen-month research project, it resulted in multiple patent filings, and it documented methods to pick, bump and mechanically bypass Medeco Biaxial and M3 cylinders — in some cases very quickly.

Then it was independently tested. In 2009, Wired bought six new Medeco cylinders and had the researchers attempt them under observation. Every one was opened in under nine minutes. Documented Video was published.

The key control problem is the worse half

Picking is the headline, but the more serious finding was about keys — because key control is the main reason anyone pays Medeco prices.

The researchers demonstrated producing working keys out of plastic, cut from a photograph of a key. Documented A journalist bought a Medeco mortise cylinder in California, scanned its key, emailed the image, and the researchers made plastic copies. The lock opened in around six seconds. Tobias called it "key-mail."

A restricted keyway is supposed to mean that possessing a key photograph gets you nothing. That demonstration attacked the premise directly, and it's why key control scores a 6 on this page rather than a 9.

The honest summary: Medeco cylinders are far harder to attack than anything at hardware-store level, and they have also been studied harder than any other American lock, by people who found things. Both are true, and a buyer should know both.

Read the last two rows together and you have the honest answer to "is it worth six times the price."

What the Maxum buys you is resistance to attacks on the lock and control over who has a key. Both are real and the B60N has neither — a stock Schlage C cylinder can be copied by anyone at any hardware store, which is the actual way most locks get "defeated."

What it doesn't buy you is a door that survives a boot, and that is the attack that overwhelmingly happens. The B60N ships a strike reinforcer with 3-inch screws in the box; the Maxum's answer to kick-ins depends entirely on what you fit it into.

So: if your threat is a key that shouldn't exist — a former tenant, a contractor, a shared building — the Maxum solves a problem the Schlage cannot, at any price. If your threat is someone kicking the door at 2am, spend $40 on the lock and the rest on the frame, and you will end up with a more secure house.

The Maxum is an outstanding piece of hardware and a genuinely sophisticated cylinder, and it is also the lock with the most thoroughly documented attack history in America. Those facts sit together comfortably, because the same qualities that made Medeco worth attacking — ubiquity in high-value installations, a reputation as the standard — are what drew eighteen months of research at it in the first place. Nobody writes a book about a Master Lock.

What it buys you is control: over who holds a key, and over what happens when someone attacks the lock directly. What it cannot buy you is a frame that survives a boot, and if you fit one without doing the four-dollar job first, you have bought a very good lock for a door that doesn't deserve it.