Confidence

[zeke79]

Yes confidence plays a huge role. When you say you can't do it you set yourself up in the mindset that you will fail. When you do that you doubt every move you make and you doubt the feedback you get from the lock when your hands are in an odd position.

I learned this on the job. When opening storage sheds the locks at times only turn so the keyway faces the jamb and you have literally not enough room to get a normal pick in due to the size of the pick handle. I use an HPC regal series set of picks IIRC which are the same picks in the KGB and tri fold wallet HPC pick sets. The handles are very tiny. When faced with a certain lock (hint american hint) when first starting out I doubted myself due to the odd positioning, lack of room for tensioning, and the tiny pick size and I only opened them up about half the time after 5 or 6 minutes of picking. Once I realized that attitude was my problem I faced the locks much differently and in my mind envisioned the lock popping open almost as soon as I had the pick in the lock I was popping them left and right. Today I open 99.9% of these locks within 2 minutes. The locks that I give up on and can't open them up on the storage shed door are usually locks that have sat in the weather for a year or two without being opened. These cases I usually find happen when it is below 25 degrees F outside. The cold kills the feeling in my hands while grasping a metal lock and the other hand is holding a metal pick with the cold wind blowing on it. I don't have the attitude that I can't open the lock because it is cold out but maybe I need to evaluate my attitude about picking in cold weather and see if I come up with anything that will help.

In short, yes your attitude and confidence play a big big role in what you can and can't open. It's like the first time you pick up a medeco to pick in the old days when they were viewed as unpickable. It was easy to give up trying due to the stigma of the lock being almost impossible to pick. Once I changed my attitude towards picking the lock things fell into place and now I pick them more often than not. I even have luck picking medeco cylinders (both air, sky, and biaxial) when they are installed in an S&G 831 or 826 and have even picked them in the hi shear locks. I have not tried to pick one in the S&G 833 but I assume it will be the same or very similar to the 826 and 833.

Keep your confidence up when facing a lock and try to not let negative thoughts enter your mind and you will find that you have much much more openings while pickinig.

[keysman]

>>In short, yes your attitude and confidence play a big big role in what you can and can't open. <<
I couldn't agree more!!. When I was an apprentice I didn't " know " american locks were considererably harder than Masters and had few problems picking them , until someone informed me they were quite different, Now I just drill them if they don't open in a few minutes.

[UnlockD]

Does confidence have anything to do with it? No doubt it does.
A buddy of mine handed me his master pro series when I just started the hobby, needless to say the lock didn't budge.
Anyways, I set it aside and worked my way up, from smaller, cheaper locks and whatnot, gaining the confidence to beat those security pins. Now I can get it in less then 10 seconds and can do more complicated locks.

Summed up,

"Crawl, walk, run."

[SAM PICK]

First post. Hi all. I am a tool fanatic and have lots of hobbies most involve making things with tools in my hands. I am brand new to this, the first lock pick I ever touched in my life was the one I made on my grinder last week (out of a new hacksaw blade) and my first torsion wrench is a blade from my reciprocating saw. Through trial, error, aggravation and lots of sanding I am finally successful with it on a few locks. I can not claim any expertise in lock picking yet. I have devoured as many posts as my brain can consume for days, I have doodled a few ideas I would like to tinker with and when my raw materials arrive I'll make a couple decent ones.

My contribution to the "Confidence" discussion is more from my love of fishing. My friends and I fish with artificial lures. I can apply some wisdom from fishing to lock picking from what I have observed to help others that are as new as I am to this.

If you do not have confidence in the lure/pick/wrench you are using then you are relying purely on blind luck. You become desperate and start changing and losing confidence in each tool without putting fourth any effort to learn the correct action, speed, method and/or conditions to succeed and just get discouraged and soon feel defeated.

This is a great place to find what the right tool for the job is and observe how and why peers using it. Learn the nature of the beast you are fighting so you know how to beat it. Pick one lure/pick learn its nature and keep using it until you reach the point of proficiency you desire, then and only then do you move on.

The right tool and confidence in your ability to use it. More times than I can count I have given a new to fishing friend a lure from my tackle box. Almost always it is one that I have never had a fish to even look at let alone convinced to eat no matter how much I tried. Weeks or months later when into said friend who was given confidence in the lure because it came from ME. Finding he has now mastered the lure and proceeds to show and tell about the scores of fish he has caught on the amazing lure I gave him that had the magic juju.

I read in a broken pick tribute where someone wrote of losing a prized treasure given to him by one of his elder peers. I smiled when reading this knowing that it was probably just one the elder would not miss, didn't like, considered worn out, or never got the feel for and generally felt it was just taking up space in his roll. But, to the newbie, it was fire from the hand of Prometheus himself.

Yeah, confidence is a big thing.