What the Letters After a Model Number Mean
607 PB, 607 AB, 607 SN and 607 BN are the same lock. The letters are the finish, and once you can read them a price list of four hundred lines collapses into about sixty products.
Insight
Open any Chinese hardware manufacturer's price list and you will find the same thing: four hundred lines that look like four hundred products, and are not. Somewhere in there are 607 PBBK, 607 ABET, 607 SNET and 607 BNET, and a buyer new to the catalogue reasonably assumes these are four different locks that happen to share a number.
They are one lock. The digits are the product. The letters are the finish, and sometimes the function. Nobody writes this down, because inside a factory it is too obvious to explain and outside one there is no way to find out. So here it is written down.
The finish codes are two letters, and the same set runs across the whole industry, not only our catalogue. PB is polished brass. AB is antique brass. AC is antique copper. SN is satin nickel. SC is satin chrome. CP is chrome plated. SS is stainless steel, and where a supplier distinguishes the two grades of it, SSS is satin stainless and PSS is polished stainless. BN is black nickel. SB is satin brass. Our own price list spells several of these out in the finish column — PB=Polish Brass on the 6094, SN=Satin Nickel on the 70710, SC=Satin Chrome on the 70610 — and once you have seen the pattern once, the rest of the list reads itself.
A third letter is usually the function rather than the finish. ET is the entrance function, keyed from the outside. PS is passage: latch only, no cylinder, for a door that closes but never locks. BK is the bathroom or privacy function, with a turn button inside and an emergency release outside. So 607 PBBK is a 607 in polished brass, bathroom function; 607 SNET is the same lock in satin nickel, keyed entrance.
This matters commercially in a way that is easy to miss. A distributor who reads the codes stops quoting four hundred products and starts quoting sixty, each in the finishes their market actually buys. It shortens the range, shortens the conversation, and shortens the sample order — because a sample of the mechanism in one finish tells you what the other five feel like.
It also changes what you check before ordering. If the letters are the finish, then the finish is the part of the order most easily got wrong, and the part a photograph settles fastest. Ask for the finish you intend to order rather than accepting the one that happens to be photographed, and if a supplier sends the polished brass image against an antique copper line, treat that as a question rather than a detail.
Two honest caveats about our own list. Not every letter in it is a finish — some older lines use a letter for the handle material or the trim style rather than the plating, and where we are not certain which, our product pages say nothing rather than guessing. And where the finish column reads AB/AC/PB/SB/SS/SP/SC all available, that is the range the model can be produced in, not the finish of the piece in the photograph. Those two are worth separating in your own records, because a range in a specification is not a specification.
If you are building a purchase order from a list like this, the useful sequence is: identify the mechanism from the digits, choose the function from the third letter group, then choose the finish last and confirm it in writing against a photograph of that exact code. The first two decisions are engineering. The last one is the one that arrives in a container and either matches the door or does not.
About Canton Hyland — Canton Hyland manufactures panic exit devices, locks and architectural door hardware for commercial and institutional projects, supplying specifiers and distributors internationally.