About Lockfront

What we do

Lockfront Automation installs, repairs and maintains the equipment that decides who gets onto a property: gate motors, garage doors and openers, boom gates, intercoms, access control, electric fencing and CCTV. We work out of our own workshop in Northmead, Benoni, and our technicians cover the East Rand, Johannesburg and the northern suburbs, at homes, complexes, estates and business premises.

Big enough to secure an estate

A shared entrance is a different job from a single driveway. The gate cycles hundreds of times a day rather than four, remotes and tags have to be managed unit by unit, and trustees need a service schedule somebody actually keeps to and a response time in writing. We run separate office and field teams for that reason, so a call about a gate that will not open is answered by a person while the technicians are out on site, and we hold stock of the parts that fail most often. That is usually the difference between a gate fixed today and a gate fixed next week.

It also means we quote to a specification rather than to a number. On a shared entrance that is a motor rated for the duty cycle it will actually see, safety beams that stop the gate when something is under it, and a manual override the guard on duty has been shown how to use.

Small enough to care

Lockfront is family owned and run. On a page like this that usually becomes the whole story, so here is the part of it that should matter to you: the person who quotes your job is accountable for it, and is still accountable a year later when it needs attention. That is the first thing to go as a company gets bigger, and keeping it is a deliberate decision about how we are structured rather than a sentiment about who owns us.

Having our own workshop is the other half of it. A motor can be stripped, tested and repaired on a bench instead of being written off on a driveway, which is why we can still work on makes that stopped being supported years ago. We fit Centurion, ET, Gemini, Hansa and DTS on gates, and Centurion, DC Blue, Gemini and Digidoor on garage doors, and we repair most other makes besides.

The standards we hold ourselves to

Values are cheap to claim on an About page, so these are written as things you can hold us to.

• A repair gets quoted as a repair. If your motor can be fixed, we will tell you so, even though the replacement is the larger invoice. If it is past economic repair we will tell you that too, and say why.
• We quote what the gate needs. A motor too small for the gate is the single most common fault we are called in to undo. We would rather lose the quote than be the reason somebody else gets that call-out.
• Quotes are itemised. Equipment, installation and every extra on its own line, so you can see what you are paying for and take out what you do not want.
• We show you the manual override on every system we fit, before we leave. Nobody should be locked in or out of their own property by something we installed.
• Our workmanship carries a 12-month guarantee, and the equipment carries the manufacturer's. If our work fails inside that, we come back and put it right.
• Compliance is quoted in, not out. Electric fencing gets its certificate of compliance, and a gate that needs safety beams is quoted with safety beams rather than without them to make the total look better.

None of that is complicated. It is simply harder to do consistently than it is to write down, which is why we would rather be judged on the second call-out than on the first quote.