I am back from a hectic week of Dubai and still struggling to get back on track. And it is not easy as there still is a lot of work to do. So please forgive me for not writing a complete report about LockCon. I am hoping maybe Schuyler will write a detailed article for NDE magazine about the event. For now I would like to cover the games played in Sneek and link to two of Marc Tobias his articles.
For the ‘Dutch Open’ lockpick competition Han and I made a last minute decision to use Medeco bi-axial locks in the finals. We did give the contestants a 100% correct cut ‘set key’ for these locks (technically speaking: no ‘half steps’ on the angled cuts). I think before this weekend, none of the finalists had ever picked a Medeco lock by using the ‘set key method’ to neutralize the sidebar before. Tobias Bluzmanis even gave some advise during the finals, and with success. The fastest opening time was 23 seconds. Marc Tobias wrote a nice piece about the finals, and even included some video clips. So check out Marc’s ‘the sidebar’ blog and his Cnet article for details (really worth reading). Bottom line of the Dutch Open 2008 is: ‘Master of the Universe’ Dr. Manfred Bölker won, followed by Dr. Torsten Quast. André Matuschek had a good weekend scoring a third place in both the lockpicking and impressioning games. And it’s obvious German SSDeV members are still dominating this game … just look at this ‘top seven’ list to see what I mean…
One game that did not turn out well was the safe combination manipulation games. In total nine people tried to open the same Sargent and Greenleaf 6730 lock in two hours time, but none of them succeeded. So the nice awards we had made are now going into the dustbin. Or maybe we will re-use them for next year … if we decide to keep trying at this game at all. Time will tell …
No matter how much time we plan for the weekend, there never is enough time to do a serious ceremony to honor the winners of the games. This year was not exception, and I really do not like it. But it somehow seems to be part of the event. We did find some time however to celebrate the winners of the Toool competition 2007/2008. It is the first year I did not made it into the top three, but then again it was purely a matter of not spending enough time on it. But it is good to see Walter Belgers was given a pretty hard time to win this edition of the competition again. Jos Weyers was runner up (like last year) and Mike Bestebroer was entering the top three for the first time. Congratulations all!
Hopefully I will have time to write up on some of the excellent presentations that were held in Sneek and other exciting things that happened there …
Ooh, I can see my tool in Andrés hand 😛 Congratsulations to all winners and hope to see also others than SSDevs in the top five next year 😉
wow, Dubai, very nice I want to get a place on the “world islands”
heads up. NDE Magazine link is without the – just http://www.ndemag.com/
Re. Picking Medeco.
It would be nice to know the angle combination on the ‘Set-up key’. Why has this not been published? I suspect that all the angles were either L
or C or R. Any other combination would have scrambled the pins and blocked the sidebar from moving.
At Exproprotection 2008 in Paris at the beginning of this month, somebody who had witnessed the use of the Set-up Key wanted to show me how it worked on a Medeco M3 cut-away cylinder. Unfortunately for him it did not work. Too much nonsense has already been written about picking Medeco.
Dear Claus,
Nice to see you have found this website. The set up key is possible because of the ‘half steps’ one can make. So a cut on ‘center-left’ will open both a center and left pin.
I will send you a private mail to clarify this some more (if you want).