My Aerostar is a 1997, and the clip was indeed easily accessible.

And I noticed early on the locksmith problem. A Google search in my area showed dozens of results that were 'in my area' but had no actual address, just a phone number. The sites were loaded with keyword spam listing every neighborhood.

Even some of the ones in the yellow pages (yes, an actual paper phonebook!!) when I called to 'confirm' their address, mumbled something about 'we no longer maintain a physical location, but can dispatch someone to your area.'

The most annoying thing was that two of the actual stores told me over the phone that they could do it, but then when I got there told me that they had to send it out to their 'other location' for $45 and a whole day of time. They were just sending it to the same guy I used and making $10 profit on top of misleading me.

I sure got an education on this episode!

 

Yeah, you're located in one of the worst areas, as many of the dispatch centers used to be located in NYC -- many have relocated to NJ, from what I hear.

True story: when my father passed two years ago, I had to fly to LA and help his widow with all the junk Dad had stored all over the place. We couldn't find one key for a padlock we needed to open, but it was old enough that Master was still inking the keycodes on their locks (they discontinued doing that many years ago). So I had the keycode, I just wanted someone to create a new key for that.

It took me -- someone who knows what they're doing -- over an hour to find a locksmith that was real via Google and the phone, and the one I found, I found via asking a neighbor, as they weren't listed via Google at all, even though they'd been in the same location for years and were literally seven blocks away.

Turns out, the woman there could not run the keycode machine, though she could look up the keycode and obtain the bitting. I stepped behind the counter and cut it myself on their machine, but the machine was so out of calibration that I ended up hand-filing the last bits with a borrowed chainsaw file. How do shops like this stay in business? They were very cheap, I'll admit.

I did, later, find a real, good locksmith shop about six miles away, that did several other jobs for me (a missing key for a gun cabinet, and like that). But it wasn't easy.