Archive for July, 2014

3D printing of keys

Saturday, July 26th, 2014

Companies have been offering 3D-printing services for keys for a while now. Apparently, not everybody is aware of this, so when Jos talked about this at HOPE, it caused a bit of a stir. Wired wrote an article about it that you can read at http://www.wired.com/2014/07/keyme-let-me-break-in/.

The article describes professional key duplication services. A few weeks ago, TOOOL member Tom decided to spend an afternoon to see if he could make a model of a standard key to be printed on a cheap consumer grade 3D printer. Here is the first result:

3D key

And here’s a picture of two printed keys with an original. The cuts were measured and printed.

3D keys

Here you see the key is working, although you can feel you have to be careful not to apply too much force.

3D key working

The thing the consumer grade printer has most problems with, it first printing separate blobs of plastic that only connect to the rest of the key as the profile is being printed. This means the key had to be lightly filed after printing, to make it operate the lock.

TOOOL at HOPE X

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014

The tenth Hackers On Planet Earth conference has just been held in New York, USA. One of the topics has been lockpicking and people from TOOOL-US as well as Jos from TOOOL-NL have been demonstrating the sport. He can be seen on the right in the picture that Hackaday put online at http://hackaday.com/2014/07/18/hope-x-lock-picking-and-lock-sport/. The official homepage of HOPE is http://www.hope.net/.

Update: video (over 3 hours!) at http://new.livestream.com/internetsociety/hopex1/videos/57118496.

Dates for LockCon 2014: September 19/20/21

Tuesday, July 1st, 2014

LockCon logo

The weekend of September 19/20/21 we will be in the good old youth hostel in Sneek for another edition of LockCon.

More information can be found here and the request for talks / presentations is open!

This year, we have three full days, so there is more time for interesting lectures and workshops. Of course, the Dutch Open lockpicking and impressioning championships will also be held during LockCon.