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Lock Picking

August 9, 2022

I’ve been having a go at lock picking recently. I was gifted a lock picking kit with five picks, two rakes, and six torsion tools. I’ve been practising on two Master Locks, the 140 and 141. These are classic beginner locks because their lower tolerances in manufacturing mean it’s generally easier to feel when the pins are lifted. They also often contain spool security pins, but the poor quality of manufacturing makes them fairly trivial to bypass. This is particularly useful for beginners like me, because it means the lock is both pickable, improving confidence and offering positive feedback, but also allows the picker to get a feel for how security pins act differently to standard locks.

There are endless resources on the web that describe the logistics of lock picking, and with far greater clarity and depth than I could hope to achieve, so I’ll leave that to others. I want instead to focus on my own experience.

I started first with the Master Lock 141D. It has no security pins, and is fairly crisp with good feedback when lifting the pins for single pin picking. I was encouraged when I had this one opened in around 10 minutes, having never tried lock picking before, knowing only the basic theory of how a pin tumbler design worked. As I practise on other locks, I come back to this one and use it as a kind of indicator as to how I’m progressing. If I can reliably pick it consistently faster, after having picked other locks in between, then maybe I’m improving generally?

The Master Lock 140 is a step up in difficulty. As noted above, it includes some spooled security pins, requiring the picker to pay more careful attention to feedback to note the difference between a set pin, and a “false set” of a security pin.