Paper locks

Wohoo … this is cool!

On Make magazine blog I read about a UK company called ‘flying pig’. This company came out with a collection of locking mechanisms that can be made from cardboard. Price: just £4.99 …

paper locks

From their website:

A working Yale type lock to cut out and make. Print out the pages of this model onto thin card, follow the fully illustrated instructions and make your own working model warded lock. The download consists of one acrobat file which will take no more than a couple of minutes download. The file has four pages of illustrated instructions for the easy construction of your model and four pages which make up model sheets.

I think they mixed up ‘yale type lock’ with ‘wafer lock’, but that does not make these models less cool.

My kids will have six weeks of holiday next week, and as part of their education I am going to build these locks with them for sure …

6 Responses to “Paper locks”

  1. hta says:

    Are you showing/selling them in Sneek… I guess it is a collecters item. And are you planing to make it a lock to pick. (Mischien is het iets als mistery lock, waar bij je, even tijdens een precentatie een sleutel vouwt omvervolgens ea te openen. en de deelnemers sucess wenst.

  2. renzo says:

    interesting

  3. henk says:

    Cool!!!Let,s make paperpicks as well 🙂

    No,really,great way to make your kids familiair with locks and their techniques!

  4. Jean-Claude says:

    They’re not familiar with history. Yale has plenty of wafer locks 🙂

  5. Schuyler says:

    Hah! That’s brilliant. I hope the kids love them.

  6. Chris says:

    I built these back when I was about 10 years old. In the book I had was the wafer lock pictured, a paper combination lock and a paper mortise lock. I remember the mortise lock as the most fun. Even in paper, it had a very satisfyingly solid locking action as the key dropped the lever exactly in sync with the motion of the bolt.

    Still, I think the wafer lock is the best as an illustration: I’ve demonstrated to several people standard pin or wafer tumbler locks work using it. It’s really an excelent and clear explanation of something that’s normally totally invisible.

    The publisher also had several other neat sciency cut out paper model books. I wish they sold in the US.