Lockpickers on Tildes?

First post as a Reddit refugee. Deep breath, but here goes...

You are definitely not the only one. We may be weird, but in a good way. As a technical person, I have been interested in locks for as long as I can remember. One of my favorite memories when visiting my my Grandmother is that she would take me to the hardware store in her little town and she would buy a lock for me. I was probably ten years old at that point. I did not have any access to picking tools, but I did have access to hacksaws, so I would cut the locks open to see how they worked.

I am pre-Internet aged, so there were no videos on YouTube to watch, and at that time, getting any information on locks was hard. As a teenager, I tried going into a couple of locksmith shops with padlocks and asking them to open them for me. If I asked questions, they would clam up, assuming I was a juvenile delinquent. To say they were not willing to share what they knew is an understatement.

In High School, I had a friend whose father was a mathematician. One day he told me that, with his father, he had worked out a formula for opening Master Lock combination padlocks! He reluctantly shared the formula with me. At that time, you could simply pull down on the shackle of the lock and spin the dial. The last number of the combination would be revealed as the pawl would drop into the slot on the third wheel. At that point you had only two more numbers to find, and if you knew the third number, the formula would tell you all of the possible combinations of the first and second numbers. I could Google it now, but as I remember, it was only something around a hundred combinations. I sat for hours spinning Master Locks, and after a while, I could get through all the possible combinations in a few minutes. That was my first breakthrough.

Getting information on picking was hard. There were courses offered in the back of magazines like Popular Mechanics, but they were serious money for someone in High School - several hundred dollars. Think several thousand now. You could not order picks, blanks or other locksmith supplies without providing proof you were a locksmith. And then, as now, if you were found carrying picking tools, it was probable cause for arrest. In the city where I lived, teenagers were regularly stopped and searched by the police, so this was a serious threat.

After studying cheap locks, I figured out you could file down most of the tabs on the keys to make a set of skeleton keys that would open any of that family of locks if the key fit the keyway. So I made a set of those. One day my dad found the skeleton keys. That was bad. He assumed I was getting in to trouble, and when I explained that it was just a hobby, he was not having any of it. To say he made my life difficult was an understatement. But at least after that, I could tinker with locks out in the open. Before that I had been keeping my hobby concealed.

I cut apart more/different locks, learning what I could. I pried the backs of Master Locks, and discovered that with some fiddling around, you could add a fourth wheel to them, making a padlock that took four numbers to open instead of three. I never could put the lock back together so that it looked like it came from the factory, but I was able to close the backs up again so that the locks were fully functional. So for the rest of High School, my locker always had a four-number padlock on it.

Finally after graduating High School, at my second job I found someone who shared my interest in locks. He had taken a locksmithing course and shared his course materials. Also, because he had a certificate from the school, he could order materials. I read everything cover-to-cover, ordered my first pick set, and started learning.

The rest is fairly boring. I was reasonably good at picking, but it is something you have to practice. As I got involved in other things, I practiced less, so my skill level dropped. The Internet was invented, and so picking information and access to tools became easy. I'm really glad to see that since it makes it much easier for anyone who shares this interest to pursue it.

Master Lock changed their locks and made it so you can't just spin the wheels to find the third number. But I saw a video the other day where you can tell the difference between the false slots on the disk and the real gate if you pay attention, so that technique is still viable on some padlocks.

At the end of the day, it is still something that interests me. It is a mechanical hobby in a time when many things are hidden inside a block of epoxy and work by electronic "magic". You can open things sometime by "non-linear" thinking, rather than just trying to open the device by using a key or spinning the wheel. Its fun, and a thinking-person's hobby.

Just remembered one last story. A High School friend of mine bought an old bank building for his business in the town where I grew up. When I went back home to visit my parents, I went to see it. Inside the building was a walk-in bank safe the size of a small room. The door of the safe was open, but locked, and he did not have the combination. It was a serious safe - the door weighed thousands of pounds. To make a long story short, I figured out how to set the combination on the safe door, and we were able to use the new combination to operate the locking mechanism. Everything looked like it worked properly, but I did not have the guts to shut the door, lock the safe and then use the combination to unlock it. If it had not worked, he would have lost access to his office, and I would have had to pay a serious locksmith to come open the safe.