Eric runs a lock shop (Au P’tit Clou Serrurerie) in Belgium, in the city of Beauraing (near Dinant and also near a degree confluence point). He has also set up a few escape rooms with a lockpicking angle. If you’ve ever been in an escape room, you know they often involve locks to be opened, to get to the next stage. But the the escape rooms Eric designed, are completely in a lock theme. One is based on the story of Charles Hobbs. Hobbs was the first to defeat the security of the locks of Jeremiah Chubb and Joseph Bramah. We still call the tools he used ‘Hobbs Hooks’.

When Eric saw the talk of Tim Jenkin at LockCon 2017, he was inspired to build another escape room about his amazing story of escaping from a Pretoria jail as well. So if you would like to relive that experience, be sure to visit Trésors Cachés!

Toool organises an ongoing competition that ends every year at LockCon. A box with locks travels to all meetings and members of Toool can have a go at them and Toool competition. Since you can really get to know the lock (you can try as often as you like), the opening times become very fast over the year.

The results of the competition were:

Here we see the winners, from left to right Tom, Walter and Jos:

Picture by Urs

The newest of the competitions is the lever lock competition. This is really fast paced, four locks to be opened in each round, with just two minutes per lock. This is done in groups of four, the winners of each group go to the final. One group had no winners (no locks opened). The first rounds went as follows:

The finals were exiting, with the following end result:

Here we see the winners, from left to right Harry, Julian and Oli:

Picture by Urs

Also many people participated in the impressioning championships. Given an Abus C83 cylinder and some blank keys, the goal was to make one of them into a working key as fast as possible. The first six would then proceed to the A-final, the second six to the B-final, to open another set of six locks.

The first round lasted an hour, but the first two times were under a minute!

The results of the first round:

Then the top-6 were to compete in the (A) final. The numbers 7 through 12 did the B-final. The results were as follows:

A FINAL

B FINAL

Here we see the winners, from left to right: Oli, Manfred and Jos:

Picture by femurat

Picture by Dennis van Zuijlekom

We regularly give lectures and workshops at conferences and for companies. Contact us if you are interested. Last week, we were at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam, where we taught people how to lockpick. They even included a lockpicking challenge in the Capture the Flag competition. Here is a picture of the lock we used for that.

Every year, Toool NL has a competition that is only open to Toool NL members. A box of around 25 locks travels to all meetings where members can try to pick the locks. What makes this quite different from regular competitions, is that you can get to learn the lock. You are allowed to improve your best picking time throughout the year, figuring out what tool works best and in what order you need to set the pins.

We assembled 26 locks this year, ranging from used locks with no apparant brand name to factory new locks. The Best lock was donated by Christina, some other locks were donated by Eurokey and Locksystems in Eindhoven, thanks! Last years competition was pretty stiff, so we settled for what we believe are slightly easier locks, but time will tell if they really are.

The competition page is at https://toool.nl/competitie2017/.

Day #2 almost blended into day #3, the last day of the event, filled with lectures and a competition, just like the previous days. Mr. Cherepov showed his safe lock that uses a matrix key. Decoder talked about how he created a tool to pick the DOM Diamant lock. Jaakko talked about his research on safe combination locks that could lead to such locks being opened in a few minutes.

After that, we had a lever lock competition. Last time, this was an impromptu thing, this year it was a real competition with a record number of participants. With only 2 minutes per lock in the first round, this was quickfire picking. Still, all the 10 groups had at least one person open a lock. The fastest 10 then tried to open six locks in the final. Only Lars succeeded in opening all six, winning him first prize.

Having a weblog like this attracts a lot of interesting people. And some people who think they are interesting and just try to feed you with little tidbits of information to ‘tease’ you. Well … I think I have grown pretty immune for that.

One of these people mailed me little over a year ago is interesting though. He claimed to had developed a method of decoding an Abloy protec ‘in around ten minutes, fifteen max’. His real problem was cutting the keys after decoding the lock. During some long talks he explained that decoding a 2, 3 or 4 cut disk was the most easy, without telling me how he did it.

And all of a sudden today there is a video on Youtube, showing the decoding of an Abloy Protec. What you see is some sort of probe tool (made from a keyblank), a scale and a laser pointer to tell you how far the probe can be turned. It seems as if this way you can identify the position of the disc, and the laser pointer will tell you the number of the cut. It is a pity he is holding the lock in his hand and that he is using a cut-away lock that is set to the factory cutaway combination ….

But this sure is a big dent in Abloy’s reputation. First the video of a destructive opening technique and now a video of decoding the ‘pickproof lock’.

I am convinced the person who made this video is very skilled and bright, and I think the video and tool are for real. I would just love to see some more close ups of the tip of the tool and some more info. And that also goes for another strange video that was released on Youtube: Pick Mottura doppia mappa.

If all goes well I will meet the person behind these tools and techniques in a month orso, and hopefully can give you some more details. In the meantime we can all speculate about the tool in the comments 😉

* Update 06-02-2009 (19:15) : the video was removed before it even got 500 hits. It is a good thing I captured it before it went offline …

** Update 08-02-2009: the video became online again on youtube and could been found here.

*** Update 14-02-2009 video was removed from youtube again…