Welcome to the Lockpick Village.
We are the open organization of lockpickers,
an international non-profit organization
dedicated to teaching hobbyist lockpicking,
sometimes called locksport.
This is the tool introduction to lockpicking talk,
where we will teach you real lockpicking
over the course of the next 20 to 25 minutes.
To begin with, though, we have some rules.
Because we are the good guys, the white hat hackers,
ethical locksporters,
we have two rules that we're very serious about.
First, don't pick locks that you don't own,
which includes the locks in your apartment
or the other institutions that you're at.
And also, don't pick locks upon which you rely.
We want lockpicking to improve your safety
and improve your ability to control your surroundings,
not damage the locks or damage your personal safety.
So follow those two rules,
help us improve the impression of lockpickers,
and help yourself stay out of trouble.
The type of lockpicking we're talking about today
is pin tumbler lockpicking,
and it has two tools involved.
Not one, not three or more.
It's two hands with two different tools
doing two different tasks inside the lock.
In Hollywood, you'll see them stick
any old thing, a piece of chewing gum,
a pen, inside the lock,
and what do you know? It just falls open.
In the real world, though, picking this type of lock
takes two different tools with two different tasks.
I show you this slide here so that you can see it
at least once right before we talk about
how it's actually done.
As for the type of lock, that pin tumbler lock,
well, that's the famous lock profile
that you've seen just about every day
if you're in North America and many
places outside North America.
Whether you see that shape in a deadbolt
or a padlock or
any time that you see that familiar
curvy shape, that's the pin tumbler lock,
and since about 1865,
it has been what we mean
when we say lock in North America.
You're used to seeing it from the outside,
which you're probably less used to seeing
is the inside. Let's go past that
front face and look behind it.
Here's your x-ray view.
And some vocabulary terms.
There's a lot of terms here.
The one I want you to focus on
is that one right in the middle,
that blue pin, which we call
the driver pin. Obviously,
they're not red and blue in real life,
and we can't really refer to them as one pin,
two pin, red pin, blue pin, nor can we
refer to them as top and bottom pin
because in Europe, when they have
these types of locks, they can often
be inverted. And since they've been doing this longer
than we have, they win. We don't call them
top and bottom. We give them functional names.
And the driver pin,
the driver pin's job is to push
down on that key pin. The key pin
holds the driver pin up, and the spring
makes sure that gravity doesn't affect
what happens with those pins.
If you want to think about it,
the driver pin is the lock
because it's the piece that's half in
and half out of that plug, that yellow plug
that turns. If the
driver pin sits right there,
then the lock stays locked
in the spring, and the key pin are just
there to make sure that unless and until
the proper key is entered, that
driver pin is in the way.
We talked about the driver
pin being in the way. What we mean is
it's at this dotted line
called the shear line. The shear line isn't
a part of a lock. It's a place
or it's really an absence of
thing, which is the separation
between, again, the plug that turns
and the housing that doesn't. As long as there's
something at that shear line, usually the driver
pin, the lock is locked, won't
turn, and won't open.
Here's what it looks like
when you try to turn the lock
with the driver pin still in place.
It wobbles
a little bit, but it doesn't open.
Think of that driver pin as saying,
no, no, still no, try again,
I'm locked.
The way to change that
is with a key. All the
key's job is to displace,
fill up that space, so that
the key pin rises up, which
in turn pushes the driver pin up,
and as soon as the driver pin
is past that shear line, and there is nothing
at the shear line, i.e.
the key pin is all the way in
and the driver pin is all the way out,
there's nothing blocking the plug,
the plug can turn, and
the lock can open.
If you take multiple
driver pins, multiple
key pins, and multiple
springs, and you all
put those in a lock body, you have a real
honest-to-goodness, bought-it-at-the-hardware
store lock.
This is the lock at rest. A few things
you'll notice about it. First,
the driver pins
are all in line at the
shear line, and they're all identical.
Also, the springs are
all identical up here,
even though they look like they're different sizes, they're
just doing what springs do in filling up
space. The key pins
are where the difference comes in.
Key pins, some are short, some are
tall. That's where the variation
lock-to-lock comes from, and by definition
the key for that lock
is the reciprocal of each of those
key pins.
Notice that the pins don't fall
all the way down to the bottom of the lock, because
the hole that each
pin is drilled into is just
the right size to make sure that
even though this area down here
looks like it's just empty space,
it's actually a little
notched so that the pins don't
fall all the way down to the bottom and that there's room
for the key. Now, if you
have the right key for the lock,
it slides in,
you'll watch the driver pins go up and down,
the key pins go up and down, and
when it's finished, there's a nice, clear shear
line. You pull the key back out,
everything returns to its resting state,
and the lock is locked again.
One more time,
the springs give way,
and then they push everything back down
to its new
resting state with a clear shear
line. If you have
a key that is almost right, you have
a lock that is almost locked.
In this case, this key is right
in the first position, third,
fourth, and fifth position,
but the second position, it doesn't lift the
key pin quite high enough, which means the driver pin isn't
lifting quite high enough, and there is still
one driver pin at the shear line.
This lock is almost
open, but almost is not good enough.
It's still locked. You can have
the alternate problem, where now
we have a key that is a little
too high in that second position, which means
it's pushed that key pin up above the
shear line. Key pins are just as
happy as driver pins to block
the shear line and prevent that lock from
opening.
But of course, where we're going,
we don't need keys. So if you
came here just to learn about keys,
then you can go. You know everything there is to
know about pin tumbler keys.
If you want to learn about lockpicking,
then kick your brain into overdrive,
because this is the complicated part here.
In a perfect
world, lockpicking would not
be possible. Now, that wouldn't be a perfect world
for all of us that love teaching
lockpicking and love doing lockpicking,
but when I say a perfect world, I mean
mathematically perfect, where things
roll off the production line exactly
the way they were designed. Here is a
schematic view of a lock. We've taken that plug,
and we've taken all the springs,
key pins, and driver pins out of it,
and we're just looking at the holes that they go into.
You'll notice that those
holes are perfectly in
line, which means
when you try to give that plug
a turn after you've filled it with
springs, driver pins,
and key pins, each one
of those driver pins that is right on the shear line,
every single one of them says
together and in unison,
no, stop, go no further,
the right key isn't in here,
this lock will remain locked.
And they agree on that.
And that would be great
if such a lock existed, because
it would be unpickable, reason being
the only way
to open the lock would be to lift
each and every one
to the right height at the right time,
and if you can do that, then you have
what's called a key.
In the real
world, however,
no lock is perfect.
So what you see here
is the downsides of mass
production. Cheap locks,
not bad locks, just inexpensive
locks built with different priorities
in mind, cost effectiveness being one
of them. So here you see the
chipping, the marring, the
misalignments, the rusting, that
comes from a real world
piece of equipment.
As a result,
if you put keypins
into it, then you'll see that they
don't all align.
In fact, up here at the top,
the holes have drifted fairly far
to the left, and down here at the
bottom, the holes have begun to drift to the right.
Of these one, two, three,
four, five, six pins,
only about one of them
is in the center where it's intended
to be. All the rest of them
wobble a little bit.
So,
here's what it looks like in the real
world. We've taken this plug again,
and we've redrawn it
to be schematic of what you'd see in
a real lock in the real world.
It was manufactured off a real
manufacturing line. And you'll see that
all the holes are still there,
but now they wander a little
bit. We put this dotted
line here to make it a little bit more obvious,
and you can see that the one, two,
three, fourth pin here is
the most out of line. If they are
not perfectly in line, then by definition
one of them has to be the most out of line.
In this case, in this particular example
of a lock, it's the fourth pin
that is the furthest to the right,
which means if we were to give that
plug a turn,
well, it wouldn't open because it's not that bad,
but what it would do is it would
stop on the one and only one
driver pin that is actually
in the way, which is the one furthest to the right.
So you can think of it as
five pins, but
now instead of agreeing whether the
lock should stay closed,
four of them are silent.
They don't even notice the plug is being turned.
One and only one of them is saying
stop, go no further.
In other words, you've paid for
five pins worth of security,
and you're only getting this one pin
worth of security right now
because of manufacturing tolerances
in the lock. So it
stands to reason that if this is the one and only
one pin that is blocking your progress,
if you could reach inside the lock
with some sort of lock
pick and lift
up on that key pin, it would
lift up on the driver pin, and if you managed
to get that driver pin above the shear line,
then nothing would be stopping the lock
from turning, and it would turn.
How far would it turn? Not a lot.
Just until it stopped
at the next pin that was
in the way. On this diagram,
it might be the first one.
You have to figure that out for yourself.
Lock by lock, pin by pin.
Remember, these are not
intentional. These are manufacturing
defects or manufacturing tolerances,
but that's the nature of
hacking. Given an inch, or given a
fraction of a millimeter, we will take
a mile. This allows us to pick
each pin individually
using only one lock pick.
So let's
go look back at that attempt
without a key. If you turn the plug,
the plug turns a little bit and then
stops on that driver pin. We call that
the binding pin. If you
can find the binding pin, then
your job is to solve the binding
pin. Lift up on it just
enough such that
the key pin pushes the driver pin
above that shear line, and watch
what happens. Something magical. The
plug turns under the driver
pin, and the driver pin can't go
home again. One
more time. Once the
driver pin goes above the shear line,
the door closes behind it,
and it traps it up there.
In other words,
it's mechanical autosave.
It's like a ratchet mechanism.
Not designed that way.
It's an effect of the manufacturing
tolerances, and we're going to exploit
the heck out of it to allow us
to set multiple pins in a row
until there are no more to set and the lock
falls open.
Here's what it looks like in practice.
We're first going to tension
the lock. If there's no tension,
then you're not picking the lock, you're just lifting
up pins and they'll fall right back down.
You need to tension the lock to create that
bind in the first place. Once you've created
the bind, your next job, find
the bind. Go through
the pins sequentially, lift
up on each one until you find one
that has a little bit of a
grind, crunch, creak,
something, anything other than
the squishiness that says
it's not the binding pin, it's
just the spring. This may take a
little bit of practice, keeping track of where you are
in the lock and learning how to feel the subtle
differences between the pins. That's the
skill of lock picking. But as
you get better at it, you'll be able to find each binding
pin, push it up just the right amount,
get the click, get the feedback, get
the little bit of turn of the lock that tells you
it's set, and then you'll go
on to the next one. Do that for as many
pins as there are in the lock,
and the lock will just fall
open. This is not like a big
safe lock where you've got it
open at the end, because
you've been turning since the very beginning
and taking away each and every
obstacle to the turning.
So, if you just put the tension
in, start turning, that same
constant steady
pressure will serve you all the way
through the end, and every time you set a
pin, the lock will turn just a little
bit more, until when you've removed
all the pins in the way, it will just
fall open.
Now let's take a look at
one of the most common problems
in lockpicking that will stop you cold,
especially if you don't know to be on the
lookout for it. We call it
overlifting, and that's when you replace one problem
with another by putting the key
pin up above the shear line, where the driver
pin normally is. You see, this
person picking along had a short
one in the fourth position, and another
short one in the third position, which
means when it comes time to pick the last
one with a little bit taller key
pin, they lift it too high
and it gets bound above the shear line.
The only way to get out of this position is to
release your tension down here, shake the
etch-a-sketch, and lose all your
progress. So,
just like getting a haircut or
salting the soup, you can always
go back and do more, it's very
hard to go back and do less. So,
light hands, small movements,
remember how small these pieces are,
and avoid overlifting, you'll save yourself
a lot of trouble. And of course, if you do get
stuck, that's okay,
shake it out, shake your hands out, shake the lock out,
start over, you'll do better
next time.
We've talked a lot about what
this hand is doing,
using the lock pick, but let's
talk about the unsung hero, the
turning tool. A lot of very
intelligent pickers will tell you
very seriously that
in all practicality, the turning tool
is what picks the lock, because the turning tool
is responsible for putting that all
important, constant, steady
pressure on the lock.
As far
as how to apply that pressure,
well, first, we like using that big
finger, the precision digit,
and put it far out on
the turning tool, so that
you can use leverage and
amplify any feedback you get.
Next question, how
much turning pressure? And I will tell
you, honestly, there is
good reasons to do light pressure, and there's
good reasons to do heavy pressure. And someone
who tells you one or the other isn't wrong,
they're weighing different things. We
at the Lock Pick Village tend to tell novice
lock pickers, start off with light pressure.
That has a lot more to do with not damaging
the locks or the equipment than it does
with being the most effective
way to pick locks. A lot of
very good lock pickers tend to use quite heavy
tension, but very carefully
modulated heavy tension. They use
the right amount of tension to get the feedback
from the lock. So, experiment
with the tension levels, but most
importantly, don't put on more than you
can confidently, comfortably, and
safely use.
As for the type of picks,
you'll probably have a lot of picks in your kit.
We call this
one the hook. We call this one the half
diamond, because apparently triangle is too
hard to say. This is sometimes
called a rake, a snake rake. There's lots of
varieties of cool little wiggly
ones. When you're just starting off,
we recommend starting with
these two, either the half diamond
or the hook, because
they tend to promote the best
practice and give you the most accuracy in
picking one pin at a time.
Now,
as you're starting off, there's a tendency
to figure out how you want to lift
in the lock. You can put it
against the bottom, you can put it against your finger,
you can float it in midair. Whatever works
for you, mindful of the
task that you're trying to do, which is
feel very small things in a lock
and get it to turn. So don't add
any more friction to the lock than you need to
and don't rub up against the sides
or other material in the lock more than
you need to. But mostly it's a matter of personal choice.
Except that, if you're doing
something like this rocking lifting,
I want you to make sure that lifting
doesn't turn into crowbar.
These are precision tools, and if you're
really digging, especially if you're using really
heavy tension, and you
start getting really firm binds,
there's a tendency to start crowbarring
and the pick starts to bend,
which means it's no good for anyone.
If these are your tools,
then that's too bad because you're out of tools.
If there are tools, it's almost worse
because then not only can we use it, but no one
else can use it either, and it makes it harder
to put on lockpick villages like we love to do.
So,
as you're picking, be gentle.
Remember these are precision tools.
I put up a picture of the bunny here, not
because I think you're children, but because I know I've
thrown a lot of complex information at you,
and if I show you a picture of a crying bunny,
you'll remember, be gentle,
ease up, use the tools
with precision.
Now, if you're just starting lockpicking,
there's a great activity that
everyone would benefit from, and that's
this. Pull the turning tool
out of the lock. Just for this one time,
don't try to pick the lock. What I want you to do
is feel the tension. Think of this as
a tension taste test, or as a
springiness taste test. Reach
into the lock with the pick of your choice,
and on that one pin,
just lift up on that pin.
This is especially great if you have a lock
where you've taken all the other pins out, and there's just
one to focus on. But you can do it with
other locks, too, with a little bit of cleverness.
Just lift up on that pin and feel
what a springy pin feels like without
any tension. Then,
and only then, add the turning
tool so that you have a little bit of tension.
And now, if there's only one pin
in the lock, you've created a binding
pin. Now go in and try
that one on for size. Feel
that binding, grinding,
crunching, scraping.
Characterize it however you want,
but being able to tell the difference between that
binding pin and the unbinding
pin without tension
is the essence of lockpicking.
And zeroing in on that feeling
will make you a much better lockpicker.
Of course, the most important
part of lockpicking is practicing,
and at Tool, we've gone to a lot of effort
to create practice locks specifically designed
for learning lockpicking.
If you're at one of our lockpick villages,
we have multiple
locks that have some of the
pins pulled out of them. So you can go
from a one-pin lock all the way up to a six-pin
lock and learn as you go.
But you don't need tool locks to practice.
You can get locks at your hardware store.
You might find padlocks like this.
They work fine. They're cheap
locks, but they'll teach you enough about
lockpicking. You can also find
just regular door deadbolt
locks. It doesn't matter what type of locks
that you get as long as you
sit down with them, you practice with them,
and you have enough of them that
you have the variety. So you're not learning how to pick
a particular lock. You're learning how to pick locks
in general. Because you're at home,
I wanted to run you through some frequently
asked questions that we often hear.
See if we can get you set up on the right path.
Preston, how do you
hold the lock? What we like to do
is turn the lock so the top part is
deep in the web of your hand, and then you can
close these two knuckles here
over the lock. Holds it fairly
gently, but securely, and
then if you stick out that index finger,
the turning tool will just rest right against
that index finger, giving you the right amount of pressure.
How do I hold the pick?
Well, think of it like a scalpel. This is
a surgical tool, so hold it like a scalpel.
That pencil grip works great.
This one doesn't work so good
because you've got a little
bit too much grip, and people
tend to
start digging too hard. And then, of course,
holding it like a shiv is right out.
That's dangerous and weird. Avoid that.
And if you
happen to have locks that are out of
their housing, so that you can see the back
of the lock, which people don't typically see,
we want to make sure that you know that the pick
goes in this part, this
shiny silver front. If you can see the back
that looks like that, that's the wrong end
of the lock. Go in the front. You'll have
a lot more luck. Now,
lock picking, not supposed to be
easy. This is new.
This is a skill-based exercise
that Evolution has done nothing to
prepare you to. So, I
want to make sure that as you're doing this, be
nice to yourself. Relax.
If you want to have a beer, talk to somebody.
That's all part of the fun. That's what we do when
we're doing tool meetups. We sit
around, we chat with each other, we relax,
we have fun with it.
And if you don't know what that animal is,
now you have seen a baby wombat
and your day is better.
And then, traditionally in lock sport,
no matter what the lock is, whether it's a practice
lock or it's a project lock that you've been working on
for weeks, when you get it open,
say open. Own it.
Celebrate it. All locks you open
are worth celebrating, and we want you to have fun
with it. Lastly,
if this sounds like fun to you, we are
a membership organization.
We have members all over the United States,
Canada, UK, Australia,
and many other countries. We would
love you to join, be a part of the organization
from your home or
in person as soon as we can.
So go check out members.tool.us
And of course, if you can't wait to get lockpicking
and you want to get your hands on lockpicking gear
as soon as you can, then tool.us
slash equipment has
exactly the gear that we like to train people
on, and we'd love you to get started on it too.
So, happy lockpicking,
practice, be gentle,
celebrate your wins, and we'll see you at the next
Lockpick Village.