This year’s theme for lockcon is the “makers view”. We have some of the best speakers in the field and it promises to be interesting as ever before.

On Friday people are welcome in the hostel from 15:00 on and dinner is served at 19:00.
Around 20:30 there is the opening speech followed by a ‘who is who’.

Saturday breakfast is served between 08:00 and 09:00
09:00 – 12:00 Peter Field will give one of his famous presentations about high-security locks
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:00 – 13:30 Michael Huebler about the current state of The Open Source Lock
13:30 – 15:30 Prioritizing Pick Designs by Christina Palmer. An illustrated presentation and open discussion of picks and turners design.
16:00 – 17:00 ******* (No Press: presenter asked not to be mentioned on public site)
17:00 – 17:30 Warren Rockley: UAP locks, their security features and how to pick them.
17:30 Dinner
19:30 Alexandre Triffault about Moveable element in keys, how it works, it it’s defeated
20:00 Alexandre Triffault Abloy protec : duplicating a key from a photography and the use of a 3D printer
20:30 Impressioning championships. Abus was kind to sponsor the event again with locks and blanks.

Sunday
08:00 – 09:30 breakfast
09:30 – 11:00 Ken Person will demonstrate some of his opening tools and talk about their design.
11:30 Start “Dutch Open” lockpick championships
12:30 – 13:30 lunch
13:30 – 15:30 finals “Dutch Open”
16:00 Closing ceremonies
17:00 Diner

There will also be a Toool memberships meeting (ALV) on Friday. At this meeting the new Toool president Walter Belgers and vice President Jos Weyers will inform the members about the way Toool-NL will be run.

We are almost fully booked btw. If you did not receive a mail from Jos a couple of days ago please make sure to mail registration2013@lockcon.com to confirm your stay!

*Updated the schedule. Somehow the talks of Michael and Alex were missing in the timeline.

Mark your calendars, we have a date for LockCon 2013.

The weekend of November 22/23/24 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!

One of the topics will be me resigning as president of Toool. At the OHM conference Walter and Jos became the new Toool president and vice president.

The reason for me leaving is that I am currently very busy with my full-time job. More about that later. First we have to get LockCon going. If you want to visit or give a presentation please email us at registration2013@lockcon.com

* Edited August 11: put the correct e-mail address in place (Thank you Emiel!)

As some of you might know I run a small 24/7 locksmith in the Amsterdam area called Intact-Noodopening.nl

The idea behind intact is to open locks, doors, cars and safes without damaging the lock. Basically I am being paid to practice in the field what I teach in my classes.

Truth is that at this moment not a whole lot of work is coming trough. And I outsource most of it since I simply do not have much time.

Never the less I decided I needed a good logo for this venue. Instead of annoying my standard logo designer I took another route: putting it for bid on 99 designs.com . So far there are three designs thar stick out.

Can you help me by selecting the logo you like for a locksmith that specializes in non-destructive entry?

*UPDATE: The designers listened to some of the input and created better versions. Please have another look.

Thanks in advance!

Interesting news. The Dutch Toool division just released the locks for tenth Toool lockpick competition.

It does contain some interesting locks. A lot of people donate to the collection and my contribution are locks picked up in south–Africa and other countries.

Not all locks have been identified by Jos Weyers (who photographed all the locks). If you can help him identify some of the unknown locks that would be appreciated.

At the competition only manual hand picks are allowed. Electro-picks are not allowed. If they were, I know what tool to use. By far the best electro-pick on the market is made by Multipick in Germany.

I spoke with one of the developers at the Interkey locksmith show in Poland last weekend and got some impressive demo’s. They make the smallest, most powerful, most silent and (unfortunately) the most expensive electro-pick on my wishlist.

I hope Santa will not forget about me this year…

(more info on my trip to Poland via twitter: barrywels )

* Update 12 December 2012 VIDEO of the electro-pick

Just a short blogposting this time to get me starting blogging again 🙂

Last weekend had a great time near Prague at the Czech lockpick championships. The Czech are friendly, well organized and sure have a lot of very exotic locks.

Our German friends from SSDeV kept scores on their blog (in German).

Below a small video of one of the rounds in ‘freestyle’. Many electronic pickguns and very fast opening times.

At the end of the year there always is the CCC congress (see FAQ for details). Very informative and worth your time.

This year the congress will be in Hamburg (instead of Berlin like previous years).

Since Hamburg is the city where locksport more or less was born, it is the ideal place to organize an international lockpicker party. On December 28th all lockpickers are welcome at the party.

And this weekend there is the Czech lockpick championships. I am curious what kind of locks they will use!

Hope to see you there!

There was a little confusion how to call the championships at LockCon. Should we call them US open or World Championships?

To keep a long story short: I won the first US impressioning championships. And it was a close call.

The close call was whether or not I would participate. I did not prepare and did not even bring gear (suitcases were full of heavy stuff anyway). It was my new friend Ben Sherman who persuaded me to participate and generously gave me his file. And Jord gave me his spare handle. What followed was me winning all three rounds. And in the third round I was nicely focused and the only finalist to open the six pin lock in 60 minutes. We are all happy the title goes back to the Netherlands.

Even though I won a number of international championships, I am not really much of a competitive player. For me it is more important to be able to open a wide variety of locks in a decent time. This is what I teach at Lock-Experts (PDF) and rely on as a locksmith at intact-noodopening.nl. But I can not deny it is a good feeling to win.

LockCon 2012 LockPick championships … of the world?

Torsten Quast won the lockpicking games, followed by Julian Hardt and Jord Knaap.

I ended sharing the fourth place with “handcuff Ray”. And that is a pity because after a long number of elimination rounds both Julian and I were the only ones who were not defeated. But then I got into a pool of three people and lost, followed by a battle to the finals with Ray. And we both did not open any of the US Corbin locks ending us both at the fourth place.

All fun aside, Torsten seemed to like the idea of being the ‘unofficial’ world champion lockpicking. The Toool board had long discussions on how to organize the first “official” world-championships of LockPicking and Impressioning in the future (in corporation with other sportgroups like SSDeV, Fools etc). The way we envision it is that every locksport and (possibly) locksmith community in the world should organize their own championships and the winners of each of these competitions will be sponsored to fly to LockCon for the first official world championships. But don’t hold your breath for it to happen soon.

What else happened at LockCon?

Besides the warning for tornado’s all went fine.

LockCon was held at the LSI facility. A great place with its own museum. Good for ours of looking at special locks. There were unique locks and keys all over the place.

We organized some workshops on interesting topics. At the tour trough the S&G factory we learned they had the ultimate safe to protect what is precious to you.

Lots of networking was done at the late night parties. People would show off their latest tool development, reverse engineer interesting hardware, make new friends and drink till all becomes blurry.

Just google for lockcon and find lots of interesting archives full of nice pictures.

Thanks everyone for making LockCon possible and hope to see you soon at a new event!

If the key to something you do not use every day is lost, it can take a little while before a locksmith is called. In this case it took them a couple of hundred years to find us!

But that is ok. I like mysteries, especially if I can help solving them. Last week was good for mystery solving and there still are some to be solved (edited 8-july: solved!) .

We were invited into some sort of museum where they had four 17th century treasure-boxes without key. They did send some images that allowed me to do some Research (via barrywels on twitter).

When we arrived we inspected the boxes and padlocks with endocsopes and decided they could probably be picked with simple steel wire bent in an L shape. Click on the image below to see how a similar mechanism is opened using two hooks. One hook lifts the hammer while the other moves the bolt.

In a little while we did mange to open a number of padlocks and one of the boxes.

Currently three 17th century treasure boxes are waiting to be opened and at least one of them contains a number of ‘heavy objects’. This is interesting, especially if you consider the boxes were used to transport valuables in ships.

Jord was asked to make a key for the lock(s) and that is quite a task with the special warding. Hopefully I can make a blackbag posting out of that too as it is an interesting process to create such a key. (more nice keys on http://www.duke.edu/web/isis/gessler/collections/locks-keys.htm)

The exact location of the remaining boxes has to be kept secret for now not to give anyone any ideas. There will be a follow up soon (after LockCon.US) and hopefully we can solve some more mysteries then.

If heaven exists, LockCon is it for us mortal lockpickers. And in one month from now it will be held (July 17/18/19)!

LockCon 2012 in the US

After a number of very successful LockCon conferences organized in Europe, this time the circus will travel to the US.

It is never easy to find a good spot for this kind of event but this year we found the best possible location: the headquarters of LSI (Lockmasters Security Institute) in Nicholasville, Kentucky.

The LSI facility is just perfect for LockCon because of the many areas where the LSI instructors normally train their customers on how to open various kind of locks. These rooms will offer the right atmosphere for our hands-on sessions and championships. And of course there is the in-house Harry Miller lock-museum (that offers napkins so you do not drool over their rare locks)

One thing that I would like to point out is that we have the same agreement with LSI as with Peter Field. Both LSI and Mr. Field will not talk to us about how to open locks. LSI only lets us use the facility on certain hours of the day and Peter Field will only talk about locks in general (in a very nice and detailed way I might add). As he said before: “I am here to talk about locks. How to open them is up to you ….”.

The US Championships in lockpicking, Impressioning and combo-manipulation

Besides many presentations (by Peter Field and others) and hands on sessions (spectacular!) LockCon will also host the US championships of lockpicking, safe combination-lock manipulation and impressioning! There will be people coming from all over the place (to name a few: Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, UK and of course the US) to see who will be the fastest lockpicker in the world. And there are very nice prices to win as our sponsors are known to be very generous. I am curious how people like Julian Hardt and Jos Weyers will do against the people in the US.

Want to join or compete?

There are still a few seat available although getting in may not be as easy as it sounds. We do have a rather strict policy of having to know you before letting you in. Having said that, we can always be persuaded if you have a kick-ass presentation to give on lock-related topics. Memebers of Aloa and/or Savta are also welcome to (try to) register.

You can always try to register or visit our CFP page and see how far you get.

Hope to see you all in one month from now in Kentucky!

Sorry for the low volume of blogpostings but I am currently involved in many projects. For example: with Lock-Experts I am preparing some private classes that involve interesting locks to study and come up with solutions.

And with the help of some friends I have set up a locksmith service with the name intact-noodopening.nl (intact emergency opening). The idea behind intact-noodopening is to practice what I preach during the lock-experts classes and open locks in the field without damaging them. It is the best of both worlds: make people happy by opening their locks make some money while learning. For the moment Intact-Open is active in the Amsterdam region in the Netherlands. For special projects we are available wherever needed.

Especially the safe-opening jobs are interesting and rewarding. It is a great buzz to open safes without damage and it is highly addictive. In a few cases I have manipulated open some mechanical Sargent & Greenleaf and LaGard combination locks while in other cases I have picked and decodedsome lever locks for customers.

There is a group of locksmiths/specialists that will (try to) answer the phone 24/7. So fee free to give us call (or send us a mail) when you are in need of a locksmith.