For this article, I thought it might be useful to take a look at two meanings of lockpicking which are floating around in common usage, both by people in the locksport community, and those outside. This won’t be a deep dive into etymology, but rather an attempt to draw out a distinction between two different …
Welcome to Part 2, looking more at dimple locks than Part 1. Part 1 is here. The other great material for making your own picks is actually the key itself. Whether a blank or a pre-cut key – often, for high security locks, the one that came with the lock, as those blanks tend to …
This week, I thought I’d share the files for a springless lever lock design I made a few years ago. I’ve been meaning to put these out there for a little while. There’ll be a series of articles going through the design written too, although that’s a non-trivial process, and will take some time. After …
If you spend a lot of time making challenge locks, repinning locks, or otherwise taking a lot of locks apart, then one of the useful tools you can look at acquiring is a pinning kit. A pinning kit is a rectangular box with different compartments which contain all of the different pins, wafers, springs, circlips, …
Apologies for the missed post last week, I’m sure it was heart-wrenching to the innumerable devoted followers of this blog! The reason was because I was giving a talk at this year’s DEFCON hacker conference, which was virtual this year. The excellent people at TOOOL US were responsible for running a lockpicking village there, which …
In my last article, I discussed how to improve the quality of your lockpicking practice, which I developed primarily to help me prepare for the LockCon picking competition that year. However, if you were thinking of participating in a lockpicking competition – Which I highly recommend to anyone with an intermediate level of lockpicking skill …
When I started picking locks, many years ago, there wasn’t an internet to ask questions of, and definitely no cheap Chinese website to order from. The first lock I picked was with a plastic coffee stirrer! This was after I watched someone break into a vending machine. As a child, I couldn’t really figure it …
There are a scarce number of resources on quality of practice when it comes to lockpicking, and I also mentioned that having as many locks as possible is key to mitigating some of the bad habits you might develop when you’re learning in this article. I’ve got a system I came up with a few …
Finally, part 4 of my series, on lockpicking tips and tricks. This article will actually cover lockpicking itself! as ever, you can read the previous article on tensioning tricks here. Lockpicking Orientation: So, my first piece of advice is on orientation. I like to orient my locks with the pins being pulled down into the …
This is part 3 of the series, where I’ll be covering tension techniques. You can read the previous article on locks here. This one is rather shorter than the other articles in the series, which I’m sure will come as a relief to some! Tension: Types of Tension: I’m going to start by talking …
Lockpicking – Beyond the Basics – Tension Tricks Read More »
