Wow … that was one impressive talk!
Jon King and Doug Farre just finished their presentation on maintaining a locksport organisation and … the medecoder tool!
Over the last months there has been a lot of speculation on how this medecoder tool worked, and today Jon King released it. Besides explaining how it works in full detail, he also had the guts to pick a six pin medeco lock on stage. It does take a lot of guts to pick a lock on stage, even if you know it inside out. A couple of hundred people watching can make you quite nervous. But he kept his cool and opened the lock.
And I shot some video of it with my photo camera, so not the best of quality, but here it is. Click above the see the youtube video, or click here for the original AVI 83 MB. I am sure you will enjoy ….
The story is Medeco will come out with special ‘ARX’ pins that will prevent this tool to work…..
Now I am heading back to the conference, but not without sharing some of the images I shot from their presentation (10 MB zip).
*Update 26/07: Video of entire presentation is online here (50 minutes!)
Hi Barry/Han,
Wow nice job they did on stage.
are they planning to bring it on
to the market ?
Have a great time there wish i was there 😛
Nice job and great to hear that it is awesome in there 🙂 I’m jealous…
BTW, I remember it is Jon and not John 😉
Putting them on the market may be a possibility, however we are not sure of the current demand of such a tool.
@doug,
Well when you look at the market and there aren’t any other tools
available for this lock and they are used quit a lot arround the
world you would think there would be a market for it. You could
check with locksmiths if there is a demand for this tool and then
make an estemate. Always worth a shot
Gr Mike
Probably best to do it sooner rather than later with medeco making the fixes. you can put my bname down for one if the price isnt silly though.
While a beautiful tool, the demand for such a tool is too specific in nature to justify its most likely costs. I would estimate the likely-hood of needing one on a regular basis to be rare. Most ‘smiths would dremel the plug and destroy by other means, and install a new deadbolt. Or find a rear way in to disassemble and rekey. Plus, if you can rekey and get copies, then it would be odd for someone not the have the bitting on file.
But a seriously impressive piece of hardware. Amazing for two individuals to be able to create such a thing.
For those curious about the mundanities of all of this, the new part number for the ARX kits is KW5004. The new pins are in every lock coming off of the line (though mixed assembly, as I understand it) and a couple of other points:
* ARX equipment was left to rust in the Medeco factory. The brief delay in reinstating the pins was a result of them repairing the equipment and getting it operational again.
* Lot of people have said the pins could be purchased prior to this, and while they are not wrong, it was usually a pretty specific subset of people who were having them installed. As such, Medeco was simply working out of back stock of these pins. I mention this just to make it clear that the pins were not being actively produced for many years, not just produced and not installed.
* Finally – many comparisons have been made between Jon’s tool and the old Medeco decoder that everyone has seen the patent drawings for (or, if you’re lucky, seen the tool itself). This was a very clever tool, but relied on a much more complex set-up key process to simply decode the lock and, at the time they were sued out of business, they had not brought a tool to market that could decode the then-new Biaxial pins. It decoded, it did not pick. Jon’s tool is for the lockpicker and has the side-effect of decoding the sidebar. It is also brutally simple in it’s operation and works on any pin generation that has the open grooves. The only part that requires practice is hooking into the sidebar grooves, otherwise it’s just lining up marks.
Anyway – I add all of this detail because I am, personally, very proud of the work that Jon has done and have seen it somewhat marginalized by misunderstandings around the community. NDE will have our final word on this, and Jon’s full paper on the tool, for release next Monday. I’m excited to see what Jon comes up with next!
And for those who care, ASP and Peerless both do a model in this format (maybe Hiatt, still checking)