SeanGallagher wrote:Yeaa I'm guessing I bought cheap stuff? ugh. Lockpicktools.com southern specialties. 65 piece kit, Like it seems of good quality but some of the picks are just too thin, you know when you are prying up on a pin and relieving tension on your tensioner, just at times the little sucker gets a little slight bend in it. The thicker picks seem fine, I'll probably just buy the picks I use a lot from somewhere else.. Says tempered stainless steel. im thinking its good quality? I dont have enough research in pick quality to know for sure.
Don't think I'm trying too be too harsh on you, but you don't know what you're doing. You didn't buy cheap picks, they're bending because you don't have a good technique and are just starting out in picking, not because of cheap metal. They're made of the same stuff that Southord, HPC, Majestic, Rytan, GOSO, KLOM are made of. Peterson is an exception, but $14 dollars a pick gets you a little better.
When you say things like "you know when you are prying up on a pin" ... NEVER pry up on a pin, that just sounds like you're forcing it. I bet you just have too much tension on the wrench, which makes all the pins bind, then you go in with a pick and you're trying to brute force the pins to go up, no wonder your picks bend, and I don't care if its the thicker ones or the thin euro ones, they're not supposed to come out bent.
When I was a n00b in 2005, my first Southord 8 piece set look like crap within a month, because I had no one to show me how to use the tools so I bent the crap out of all my hooks, half diamond, S rake, and broke all my wrenches. Had to buy another set. What you have is what I had, a heavy hand. Try to think of locks in this context: the pins in a lock are like little metal rods that keep the plug from turning, when you insert the key, it lifts all the metal rods out of the way so the plug can turn. The key has two functions, the cuts on it lift the pins out of the way, then the bow of the key provides for a convenient handle so you can turn the plug. As a picker, we don't have a key to do this for us, so we do it with individual picks to go in and lift the pins 1 at a time, or rake a couple at a time, and then we have the wrench to apply some rotation to keep the pins up, and when they all move out of the way of the plug and create a shear line, we use the wrench to turn the plug and unlock the lock.
Now that you know all that, consider that applying a lot of force to the wrench wont make the lock open, it would take a ton of force to snap the little metal rods (the pins) inside the lock, so the best we can do is apply little force to just keep the pins grinding against the side walls of the lock so they dont fall back down while we are picking. Here's another good tip. If your fingers are turning white where the wrench is pressing, you're applying too much force.
Just keep practicing and try to be less heavy handed, but whatever you do, don't blame it on the picks.
Squelchtone
