Archive for the ‘Locks’ Category

-3 seconds, Impressioning tool

Thursday, February 2nd, 2023

Impressioning competition are all about opening the most locks in the least amount of time. Quite often, every second counts. As we have been playing the game for a couple of decades, it wouldn’t surprise you that the locks become harder, the times have been getting faster, and the openings more consistent.

Most of the players have reinvented their setup multiple times. I’ve seen 3D printed attributes for key marking, and often see the newest inventions. To keep it fair, however, you require sharing the idea before the competition, as to prevent an unfair advantage.

My first improvements have been to watch the masters work, and to copy what they do. Whereas my last improvements are much more subtle. I’ve, for example, reduced the distance between the lock, lamp, and table. And improved my handling process to save seconds here and there. I don’t believe we are done, either, as I’m trying to find a better way of placing my file when I’m not using it.

The tool idea of this blog isn’t a new one. It has, in fact, existed over a decade in use. We have blogged about it back then: When every second counts: formula 1 impressioning tool. It’s however, still relevant.

What is it? It’s a modified cylinder where the pins are replaced by sharp carbide rods. By pressing a key into the pins, the pin positions are marked on the key. Which, in turn, allows a key of all depths one to be made. The process takes a second, instead of preparing a blank with sand paper, a filling jig, or marking the positions one by one with a scribe. To be completely honest, it might not save me too much time, I just like it as a convenience tool.

I’ve built my first version after I impressioned my first lock, early 2018. It’s not the prettiest, but it worked for over a thousand keys. At that time, I impressioned a lock a day for every day in January. At UKlocksport forum, this is known as the January challenge. I’ve got some good stories about it, including a friend that just never stopped and has a streak in the thousands. (Please, Toni, remind me to write a blog about it.)

The key below shows the principle of operation. The scribe replacement tips scratch the surface of the key. For this one, the scratches are deeper than I like, but it shows the idea. You want a mark, but not too deep.

The current version, as shown in the pictures below, are from a small series production I’ve made for LockCon 2022. It was well received, and I’ve helped many of my friends with one of them. Making them commercially is very much not worth it. But if you want one, or the bits to make one, I might have some.

Please remember, even with all the impressioning gadgets, it’s not going to make a difference if you didn’t put in the hours. Consistency is key.

Pictures are copyright CCBY4.0 Jan-Willem Markus @ Blackbag.

Gorgeous cutaway photos from Qikom

Wednesday, January 25th, 2023

Qikom, lockpicker from France, created gorgeous locks cutaways and shared the images online. I believe cutaways to be very useful for understanding intricate lock designs. Where a good cutaway allows us to observe the elements of the lock while still functioning as normal.

Qikom is an associate professor in mathematics and computer science. Who got interesting in lock picking a little before 2000 after reading R. Feynman (the physicist) autobiography. Like many pickers, he is interested in the “puzzle” aspect of locks, and making a working cutaway is another kind of puzzle. Furthermore, he added, to spend more time making cutaways than picking locks!

You can find Qikom’s complete cutaway collection at: http://qikom.free.fr/. The pictures are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Screenshot from Qikom’s website as of January 2023.
http://qikom.free.fr/ CC BY-NC-SA 4.0


I’ve asked Qikom for tips on making great cutaways. He says about his cutaway strategy:

“I don’t have a well-defined strategy when planning a new cutaway. I know people start by making a 3D model of the lock to plan the cuts, but I don’t bother. In many of the locks I’ve cut, the cutting plan isn’t all that complex, and I try to set things up, so I can adjust things incrementally. One important thing I do, is to never cut a lock on the same day that I come up with the cutting plan, to get some time to think about it.

I usually try to have at least 2 identical locks to cut, and I consider one of them to be expendable. When everything works, I can sell / trade the second one, and if not, I get to correct any mistake on the second try. A couple of times, I badly failed twice, but could salvage enough parts to get the third attempt.
But there are still some locks waiting because I wouldn’t want to mess them up.

I’ve made several embarrassing goofs along the way, but none of them would have been prevented by that! The graveyard includes several Robur, Rosengrens, Abloy, Fontaine, and Fichet… 🪦 I’ve only attempted cutting an F3D when I got a couple of broken ones. This was a good idea, because the first 3 attempts were failures.

But there are still some locks waiting because I wouldn’t want to mess them up. Including the Emhart.”

Qikom often sells his cutaways online to partially fund the hobby. If you have interesting in these locks, or have a few spares that would work as a cutaway, consider contacting Qikom at qikom@free.fr


25/25 6-pin cylinder

Wednesday, January 18th, 2023

I got some new (old) cylinders. One was a small 25/25 cylinder with the key stuck in it. When I disassembled it, I was amazed to see six pins instead of the maybe three I was expecting.

The housing pins were tiny and also very short, except for one tall one, that has a double function as an anti-drill pin. The corresponding key pin is also made of hardened steel. There is one regular housing pin that is longer than the others. You would expect the key to have one cut that is deeper than the others, but that is not the case.

After reassembling, the cylinder worked fine again. Here’s a comparison of the key to this cylinder with one of a regular 6-pin cylinder:

Edit: it is a lock from the manufacturer DOM.

Photos CCBY4.0 Walter @ Toool Blackbag

Czech Lockpicking Championships

Monday, October 31st, 2022

The Association of Czech Lockpickers held their yearly competition last weekend. Starting up after COVID, they offered a limited program without impressioning championships, but still included a padlock competition, blitz, cylinders and freestyle.

I (Walter) went over to participate. There were competitors from Czechia, Germany, Austria, Hungary and I was the representative for the Netherlands. The championships were held at a nice and cosy facility, giving ample room for socialising and catching up with old friends.

Some of the ‘usual suspects’ were absent due to work or for other reasons, but still there were plenty of people participating

Padlocks

First up was the padlock competition. The padlocks were provided and differed quite a lot in difficulty. You are allowed to test your tension wrench before the clock starts. For one particular lock, it was hard to test the tension wrench without accidentially already opening the lock.. on the other side of the spectrum, some of the Tokoz padlocks proven impossible to open in the allotted time.

I had a tool stuck in a lock which I why I didn’t make the A-finals. But all for the best, because in the B-final I then became second. There were 7 people in the A-final, 9 in the B-final.

Blitz

The blitz competition requires opening locks within a minute. Each participant brings their own lock. I was a bit confused here.. I’ve done such competitions before. I fondly remember the one held by SSDeV in 2003. People would give me the lock and tell me exactly how to open, because the goal here is not to bring a difficult lock, but to encourage beginning lockpickers to have success. It is a competition that should also show the audience that lockpicking is a sport that can be done by anyone. However, at this competition, there were very difficult locks, I even saw a Mul-T-Lock with the pin-in-pin system. It was no surprise that it take not long for most of the people to be out of the game, me included.

Cylinders

For me, the cylinder opening is the most interesting competition and I was looking forward to it, after the Blitz. For this competition, people take their own locks that they need to open within 5 minutes or they cannot participate. I took an Ivana Necoloc (rebranded Anker Infinity) that was used in the Toool championship finals (nobody opened it there in 15 minutes). For the first time, I prepared for a competition, because I practiced opening this lock within 5 minutes. I managed to do so here under stress as well (about 1’20) and could participate. The competition saw some very difficult locks, such as the EVVA ICS.

I made it to the A finals, even though I did not open the FAB lock. Later, I learned it has a very deep pin because of bump protection, which I somehow missed in the stress.

In the final, I openend a cheap lock (Legallais) and a Winkhaus, but left the EVVA ICS and Cisa SB (similar to Abus XP1) closed. The Cisa was almost completely picked until I made a mistake and had to start over. Jascha had the same happening to him. The last round I got Jascha’s Yale dimple lock which had dimples and sliders. I destroyed my lockpick on it, but opened it in 14’58! That, in the end, was enough for fourth place overall. I though my Ivana lock would be difficult enough to give me an advantage, but it turned out everybody in the A-finals opened it within the 15 minutes.

Freestyle

For the freestyle competition, the locks were once more provided. They needed to be opened within 5 minutes. I did not bring any electropicks or other ‘freestyle’ tools, so reverted to normal picking. I again made it to the A-finals. There, I opened 3 EVVA locks and 2 Euro Plus locks. Once I figured using the Bogoto was the way to go, I opened these in seconds, but unfortunately the first EVVA and Euro Plus took me 1’49 and 2’14. THere were 2 Mul-T-Lock interactive cylinders that “talked” to me but wouldn’ open in the end, a FAB 400 I had opened in the first round but wouldn’t open in the final and a Kaba Gemini that was only opened by the winner using an electropick (and a bit of luck). I think it was due to my time that I only became 7th here.

Overall it was a very nice competition with a good atmosphere. Thanks to the organisers!

Photos CCBY4.0 Walter @ Toool Blackbag

Continued work on MIWA/Anker 3800

Monday, October 3rd, 2022

I had spent quite some time on the Anker 3800 cylinder. This system was originally patented by the Japanese firm MIWA. It contains just 4 pins, each of them having 4 possible depths. But, there’s also 4 sliders that are magnetically operated by magnets in the key.

An Anker 3800 Eurocylinder
The keys

This system was sold in the Netherlands by Dutch firm Ankerslot and is still used in many large, high security setups.

I made a magnetometer to decode the magnets in a key or in a cylinder, made a 3D model of the key to be able to print it and figured out how to get the master key of a system. My talk at Disobey is available online.

At LockCon, Han provided me with a set of five cylinders, all keyed differently but all part of the same masterkey system. No keys were provided.

I started by reading out all the magnets in the sliders. Each slider can have one or two magnets. If there are two, one is for the user key, one for the master key (we’ll ignore submasters for the moment). By knowing the magnets in the cylinder, it is possible to figure out which magnet should be in the key. For master keyed systems, there might be two possible magnets to operate the slider, where one will be in the master key, the other in the user key. With this information, I could determine the magnets in the master key and in the individual user keys (for each slider, there was only one possible magnet that would open all cylinders, so it was clear that that particular magnet should be present in the master key).

The correct bitting is another story. I had no key to start with. It is possible to create 256 keys and try them all to find all possible bittings. I was lucky however to have gotten one half cylinder.

What I did is create a bump key (so four times the deepest cut, which I will call a ‘4’), containing the correct magnets. With the bump key, I could open a cylinder and disassemble it. The half cylinder was my luck, as that can also be re-assembled. For this task, I used a 3D-printed plug follower.

This gave me all the correct bitting positions for this one cylinder (pin 1: 3 or 4, pin 2: 1 or 3, pin 3: 2 or 3, pin 4: 4). Since I did not have the original key, I did not know which depth belongs to the user key and which to the master key. The configuration allows for 2^3=8 possibilities. By creating 8 keys and trying them on the other cylinders, I could find out the master key bitting. With 3D printed keys, it is possible to print, say, a 3/1/2/4 key and if it doesn’t work, file a bit away to get a 4/1/2/4 key. That is exactly what I did and 4/1/2/4 worked on all cylinders, giving me the correct master key.

Next, I wanted to create the user keys. I could have created user keys by only using different magnets and keeping the bitting the same, but that would not give me the keys as they would originally be made for these cylinders. Since I now had a working master key, I could easily probe each pin position for all depths in sequence. I started with a 1/1/2/4 key, trying that on the 4 remaining cylinders and writing down the results, then filing it to a 2/1/2/4, trying again and then 3/1/2/4. With four keys to start with and 4*3=12 filing actions I was able to decode all the bittings.

Decoded cylinders, ‘G’ and ‘R’ are north/south poles (my magnetometer uses green/red light as an indicator)

Here, I have put squares around the magnets and bittings of the master key. If there are other bittings or magnets, they must be in the user key. The first pin of cylinder 2 for instance has possibile depths 3 and 4, and the master key has depth 4, so the user key must have depth 3. Note that in this system (and in this instance), user keys can have a bitting that can be filed down to the master key, as long as the magnets are different. Cylinder 2 shares the middle two magnets with the master key, the outer two are different.

With that information, I knew all the individual keys and printed them.

The user keys only open one cylinder each

And I have the master key.

The master key is golden of course

In fact, with this collection of cylinders, it is now also possible to make submaster keys for certain subsets of cylinders, even if that was not intended originally.

Thanks for reading! -Walter.

Photos CCBY4.0 Walter @ Toool Blackbag

The one-pin lock

Friday, September 2nd, 2022

Eurocylinders have a standard form factor, but they come in different sizes. In the middle is the cam and the screw to attach the cylinder to the door. Measuring the lengths from the center of the cam to both ends gives you the length, for instance, 30/30 is a popular size. This means both ends are 30mm or 3cm for a total length of 6cm.

Although sizes of 30mm and 35mm (or combinations with 10mm for half cylinders) are pretty normal, there’s quite a variation in lengths, especially if you go to Belgium for instance.

A 45/55 cylinder

Very long ones such as the 45/55 above, are quite rare. Ones shorter than 30 are also rare. I had come across a 25/25 once, but a while ago, my favourite locksmith from Oostende (Birger) gave me a 20/20 cylinder.

A 20/20 cylinder

It did not come with a key. The cylinder only has one pin! This means that any key that fits the keyway can be used to open it: just insert the slope of the key just far enough to push the pin to the shear line.

By not inserting the key fully, we can pick the one pin

The cylinder did not come with a key, so I used impressioning to make one.

The impressioned key

Photos CCBY4.0 Walter @ Toool Blackbag

Lock Picking Forensics

Wednesday, October 6th, 2021

I (Walter) have created a geocache that requires some RSA hacking and subsequently lockpicking. I bought an Abus Titalium 64TI/40 padlock to be picked. Several people were able to find it by teaming up together. The feedback I got was that people spent considerable time on the lock, sometimes several hours (in separate sessions).

Geocacher #15 was unable to lockpick the lock, even though he had practiced on an identical lock at home. I offered to go with him to give advice. He couldn’t open it. Also I couldn’t (quickly) open it. I took the original key and that would not open it. By not fully inserting the key and wiggling, I succeeded in opening. (I let the geocacher pick his own lock and allowed him to log the cache.)

Once home, I decided to take a look at the lock. Although only a very limited number of people had worked on it, it was completely shot. I took a video comparing showing a new padlock and then the one from the cache:

I’ve taken apart the lock to have a look at the pins. We always say that picking a lock will leave tiny traces on the pins (and other parts of the lock) that can be found during a forensic investigation. Well, in this case, the naked eye was enough to see the abuse.

Here’s the plug with the key inserted. Note how the pins have shortened. This causes the key to no longer work.

This also explains why taking out the key a bit and wiggling opened it.

Here’s a view of the pins:

There’s now a new padlock in place. You can’t really tell from the picture here, but the pins are made out of aluminium, which kind of explains the wear on them. I bought the lock as it is marketed as being weather proof. But resisting weather is different from resisting lockpicks.

Photos/video CCBY4.0 Walter Belgers

Manipulating the Stanton Concepts RKS

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

By Tom Eklöf (obrotund on Discord), 2021 (CC BY-SA 4.0 license.)
Previous post on RKS: https://blackbag.toool.nl/?p=3416

This is a proof of concept for a manipulation method for the RKS. At least a passing familiarity with safe combination lock manipulation is assumed.

As far as I know this is the first public manipulation for the RKS – or at least it was when I did the actual manipulation some months before writing this post. Please do let me know if you know of others before me.

editors note: Pics or it didn’t happen, no hearsay allowed. 🙂

RKS operating principle

I’ll provide a quick rundown of how the RKS lock works, but I’d suggest reading Han Fey’s excellent writeup for more in-depth information. Note that there are some differences between what’s detailed in the doc versus the lock I have, but the general idea is the same.

The RKS cam lock innards resemble a hybrid of a fixed drive pin combination lock and a disk detainer lock. Like both disk detainers and combination locks, it has several disks with gates on them (ie. wheels in combination lock terms, but the RKS doc uses “disk” so I’ve stuck to the same terminology) – 5 in my version – and a drive disk which is equivalent to the cam. Like in combination locks, the gates can use the full 360° of the disk. Each disk including the drive disk has multiple false gates in addition to the true gate, but they’re equally spaced. Like in a disk detainer cam lock, the plug is prevented from rotating by a sidebar that fits into the gates on the disks. The combination is changed by changing the position of a drive pin on the edge of each disk, similarly to screw change combination locks although it seemed like only the “bottom” or dialer side pin is changeable – or possibly the ones I tried were just very tight, but I didn’t want to force them considering how tiny the screws are.

The drive disk is at the “far” or cam end of the lock, and it’s driven by a drive shaft that goes through the disk pack and is connected to a detachable dialer, either manual (which I have) or electronic. In effect this gives us a 5 wheel combination lock with each number in the combination between 0 – 63 which is opened like a fixed drive pin lock: you always track the previous number, so if the combination starts L30 R7 L28 … you need to pass L30 5 times (ie stop on the 6th), then dialing R7 you need to pass 30 4 times before stopping on R7, then going to L28 you need to pass 7 three times etc etc. After you’ve dialed the combination you apply counterclockwise tension to the edge of the dialer to rotate the plug itself (ie you don’t rotate the “dialing part” of the dial so the drive disk doesn’t move), which then forces the sidebar to slide down into the gates and allows the plug to rotate.

Note: I’ll use the same numbering scheme for the disks as with combination locks, so disk 1 (abbreviated to d1) is the one closest to the dialer and disk 5 (d5) the one furthest away from it, right next to the drive disk.

The cutaway lock, sidebar and disks visible. The drive disk is the one on the right, followed by d5, then d4 etc.

View of the “keyway”

Manual dialer. The dial itself is rotated with the knob, and torquing the body / edge (the black part) of the dialer counterclockwise is used to actually open the lock

Manual dialer, underside. The black screw visible on the right side of the body of the dialer makes it click to increments when dialing

Measurements

  • number range 0 – 63, meaning 5.625° per increment
  • 5 disks and a drive disk
  • 4 gates per disk (including drive), 3 of which false at 16 increments or 90° apart
  • 8 drive pin holes per disk, at both edges of each gate
  • gates are ~5 (28°) increments wide, including the drive disk. Measured by looking at the cutaway from the top and moving the edge of the sidebar from one side of a gate to another
  • gate binding (or, rather, lack thereof) can be felt for ~6 increments
  • drive pin width is ~2 increments, 11.25°
  • sidebar ~2.2mm

Top and under side of disks with default “0” pinning. Each disk’s three false gates are a bit poorly visible in this picture, but all gates are 90° from each other.

Figuring out a manipulation method

To even get started I had to slightly modify the dialer; normally it clicks in place to number increments, but that would stop me from getting useful feedback. I removed the screw that does this, meaning I got a free-spinning dial. Unfortunately that made accurate dialing very hard since the dial moves if you so much as look at it wrong.

My initial thought was to approach the RKS like a DD lock; I first turned all disks left or counterclockwise (“ADL”, i.e. same as AWL or all wheels left for regular combination locks) to L0, then started to apply tension while turning the dial to the right, feeling for gates on d5 passing under the sidebar. However, this method has some fairly obvious problems. First of all, you get feedback from the gates (false or otherwise) of every disk that’s rotating, including the drive disk. Even on d5 you’ve got the drive disk gates and d5’s own gates in play, and it only gets worse the further down the disk pack you go. I did feel the gates (true & false) on d5, and while I thought I could distinguish false ones from the true but that seems to have just been confirmation bias.

Like with safe combination locks, some disks are also “shadowed” by others due to manufacturing tolerances, meaning that a very slightly bigger disk (or one that sits slightly higher on the drive shaft) will block feedback from smaller disks. This means that simply turning all disks in one direction won’t necessarily give you the gate positions on all disks.

So, obviously this wasn’t a viable manipulation method, at least by itself.

“Well, it’s sort of like a safe lock?”

Maybe I should have approached it more like a safe lock?

My reasoning was that when there’s a gate under the sidebar, applying tension with the drive disk gate (think “cam gate”) also under the sidebar should allow the sidebar to descend slightly lower than otherwise, meaning I should be able to measure the width of the area where the sidebar doesn’t bind near the drive disk gate when I apply torque to the dialer’s edges to make the sidebar drop down – this is the RKS’s equivalent of the contact area and contact points you deal with on safe combination locks.

Unsurprisingly this method turned out to be the proverbial ticket, but to actually get good results I had to refine it. I had problems with consistent torque when tensioning, poor choice of initial disk positions when starting graphs, slop / play in the dial, and the sheer amount of dialing that would have to be done unless I cut down on the number of measurements I had to do.

Tensioning

Getting consistent readings was hard since I was tensioning using my fingers – the torque I was applying was variable, which meant that the sidebar lowered different amounts every time I took measurements. So to even get started I needed to come up with a way to provide consistent torque when tensioning, and I experimented with a few different methods. Since this is a proof of concept I eventually gave up and ended up cheating a bit and tensioning by hanging some weight from the cam itself, but something similar-ish should be doable on the dialer side albeit with more work.

Tensioner attachment on the cam.

Tensioner weight (and yes that’s a Manifoil lead shield)

Initial disk positions

I started my first graphs with ADL. However I soon realized why this is a bad idea.

When going ADL, the drive pin of the previous disk ends up in the gate, meaning that it blocks the sidebar from descending and therefore gives you much narrower and shallower gate signatures.

Going ADR leaves the gates open.

Dialing

Dialing with a modified free-spinning manual dialer is extremely fiddly and liable to drive you insane, and since there’s 5 disks the amount of dialing that would have to be done with a “naïve” approach would be ridiculous.

However, the fact that gates are always 90° apart can be exploited to radically cut down on the amount of dialing. This means that when you find one position where the drive disk doesn’t bind, you know that the other gates are n * 16 increments (1 <= n <= 3) apart from it. Since gates can be felt over about 6 increments, you can then map out the edges of one gate and therefore figure out the edges of all gates.

Also, as I went along it turned out that I was getting indications in order starting from d5; my assumption is that this was due to the fact that I was tensioning the lock from the rear which meant that the sidebar would be at a very slight angle so that it’s lower on the d5 end and higher on the d1 end. After some playing around I noted the same phenomenon but reversed if I tensioned using the dialer (like it would “really” be done), so d1 would read first, then d2 and so on. This meant that once you successfully find the position of a disk’s gate you can figure out how many increments from that position the next disk’s gate will be at a minimum, and start your next graph from that position so you wouldn’t waste time graphing a spot where it’s impossible to have a gate. You can do this by using the fact that there’s a fixed amount of drive pin positions; when going right the minimum distance is - (pin distance + pin width * 2) , and left is pin distance - pin width, both modulo 64 (proof is left as an exercise to the reader).

Graphs

Graphs for this method end up looking slightly different from safe combination locks since a lot of the time you’re not actually getting any binding on the drive disk due to shadowing, so for some indices you can’t get any contact point readings.

I generally kept the cutaway “window” covered, but since this was a proof of concept I occasionally peeked to verify theories or make sure I dialed a number right.

I’ll showcase the graphs for the first 3 disks here since they’re the most interesting.

ADL

As I said, I started off with ADL before realizing it’s a bad idea. This is what the first graph where I used the tensioning tool but with ADL looked like (left contact on the bottom):

So I found the gates, but I couldn’t tell the true gate apart from the false ones.

First ADR, disk 5

Switching to ADR gave this graph. Note that only 3 gates are visible; one of them was shadowed entirely by a disk further down the pack.

The gate with midpoint R49 gave the deepest reading with the sharpest edges. My theory was that since the false gates are so shallow, that’d be the true gate on some disk. I used my Mk I Eyeball on the cutaway window and noted that it was the gate for d5, so now I could be fairly confident that I should be able to tell the true gate apart from the false ones.

To actually verify this, I started by moving d5 a bit to the left and checked for sidebar binding. After I got worse binding for that, I did the same for d4 and got good binding, then d3 and still got good binding (ie. I essentially did a lo test but with only 3 disks). This satisfied me that I’d probably found the number for d5: R49 / L46

Disk 4

I started the next graph assuming that I’d probably be getting indications from d4, so I dialed d5 to L46 and then the rest to R38 which should be close to the first possible index for the true gate on d4.

Note that gate edges are about 2 increments – ie. drive pin width – off from the gates on d5: there’s a gate edge at R20 here but it’s R18 on d5, there’s a gate edge at R36 here but R34 on d5 etc. This means that this graph is most likely for d4.

The gate with midpoint R2 has the sharpest profile, so I assume that’s the true gate. I do a lo test with just d4 and get worse results, so I figure that my assumption about this being d4 was right.

Disk 4 rotational conversion

I initially tried doing rotational conversion with my estimation of the drive pin width plus some simple math, but I kept having problems with it so I end up doing it with graphs. This is what the graph looked like for d4 R2, determining the gate midpoint is at L59:

Lucky disk 3

After finding the gate for d4, I dialed d5 @ R49, d4 @ L59, and the rest ADR to R60 which would be the first possible index for the gate on d3:

After measuring a few points around R60 I realized I probably hit the true gate right off the bat since the gate signature was so sharp and deep. I took readings from the midpoints of all the other gates and noted that they weren’t as deep as the one at R60, and after a quick lo test I declared d3 to be R60.

Disks 2 and 1 held no surprises and graphed as the first 3 had.

Et voilà, that’s how you manipulate an RKS.

Bought 70kg of locks, now what?

Wednesday, May 19th, 2021

Once in a while we find locks for sale in bulk. Either as a large bucket or just a pile of brass. Most of the times it’s not worth the time and effort. (sorting and cleaning takes loooong). While other times the deal is just too good to pass on.

We bought a batch last week: Sold as 70kg of recycling brass. Seemed alight as it was not too expensive and the locks looked clean. It was also clear from the pictures that there wasn’t much high security or ‘expensive’ locks in there.

A few of these boxes/crates full of locks doesn’t look much until you need to carry them home.
Nicely sorted Basi.
All the locks!

In total it’s about 400 locks: 20% BASI, 20% MD, 40% DESTIL, 15% other (DOM, Corbin, Nemef, CES, S^2, etc etc.), and about 5% trash (tags, screws, actual trash). There are very few jewels in the box: Anker necoloc, DOM sigma, and a keyed alike Zi-ikon set with one key.

Most will be put to restocking the lockpicking village kits. The Basi will make very nice progressive locks. The Destil, however, are (re-branded?) Corbin locks and always a pain to pick. Therefore a lot less useful for teaching lockpicking. (Maybe keep a few for teaching humility or patience?). All other locks will be saved for the Dutch open at the next LockCon.

As always the picture of the bucket looked more promising than the outcome. However, the easy locks will come in very useful. It’s just not as fun as finding a EVVA MCS in the crap bin. Maybe there will be one in the next one…

Lock pin collection

Friday, March 19th, 2021

In a previous blog post Jan-Willem’s pin collection was mentioned. In this post the pictures of the pins and keys are shared.

There is no epic conclusions to this project. At this moment it’s is just a collection of photos of locks and pins. Shared with the world. Hopefully it’ll be a resource for new pickers that would like to know what they are up against. Maybe future research will use it. Where someone clever uses the fact some spools are different than others to decode the lock. Sputnik comes to mind and we think the possibilities are not exhausted yet. (If you are working on something I’m happy to assist.)

New pickers, don’t be intimidated by the key or keyway. If you look through the collection much of the pins are underwhelming. Where a Evva is known to be difficult lock it was not expected to find all standards or one spool pin. When struggling with a lock just take it apart and see what’s in there. For the next time you encounter the same lock you will know Nemef has a spool on position two (insider joke).

This collection has a few obvious biases:

  • The collection only contains basic pin tumblers.
  • Most locks are from Europe, and are from well known lock brands.
  • The locks are not too expensive and are usually old. Therefore it lacks fancy pins like gins and Christmas trees.
  • Pins/locks that are too similar are rejected. There are some duplicates as well.
  • This is a snapshot in time. The pinning of the locks change every few years. A good example is DOM RN with two different types of pins in this collection.

If you have specific knowledge on these locks. Please share, we are open to learning more about locks. Find us on Discord, leave a comment or send us an email.

The photos are: key, pins, key, pins. The photos of pins are arranged with the brand and number. The keys have ‘key’ in the name. The Titan with a key engraved D5474 will have the pictures: TitanD5474-1key-1-scaled.jpg and TitanD5474-1-1-scaled.jpg.

The pictures are by Jan-Willem Markus. CC BY 3.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
In short: you are free to use, modify and share these photos as long as you give attribution. If you plan on selling them or using hem in a blog/paper/book please notify us.

The end.