This is a quick post about making your own locksmith cylinder repair and take it apart tools. Now, you’ll need to buy circlip pliers, or just risk stabbing yourself with a small flathead screwdriver to remove the circlip on most lock cylinders. Everything else? You can improvise. A plug follower can be made from a […]
Making your own tools – Part 4 Read More »
Welcome to Part 3: making your own lever lock picks 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 be very hard to get –
Making your own tools – Part 3 Read More »
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
Specific vs General Lockpicking Read More »
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
Making your own tools – Part 2 Read More »
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
Springless Lever Lock Read More »
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,
Making your own pinning kit Read More »
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
High Security Wafer Locks – My Defcon Talk Read More »
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
Competitive Strategy Read More »
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
Making your own tools – Part 1 Read More »
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
Improving Quality of Lockpicking Practice Read More »
