Ever broken a lock by picking

[dls]

After picking some cheapo locks they seem to get harder to pick and eventually i cant pick them at all, we are talking about maybe picking each lock about twenty or thirty times.
What im thinking about here is the locks are made of softer brass and are getting stuffed up with filings made by the picks. Yes the picks are nicely rounded and smooth, some locks where old but never used and some where well worn to begin with but the result is always the same after multiple picks they seem to get allot harder.

[lock2006]

No i never ever broke a lock by picking before
but ,i did broke a couples of picks, by picking the locks before
either by forcing the picks on the narrow keyways or by pushing or pulling picks to hard
on locks.

[camelgd]

The worst I ever messed up a lock by picking was one of the old Dexter spring latch locks with the short key and the tumbler chambers extremely close together. Late night, house lockout, only lock available to me to get the customer back in. I put my tension wrench in the bottom of the keyway, and put just a little pressure on it. All of a sudden, the plug split in half down the middle. I managed to pick it anyway, becausethe housing kept the plug fairly stable, and this kind of Dexter has two screws that hold the tailpiece on that helped also. Come to find out, over the years, that a split plug in this lock is not uncommon, with a lot of wear. The original keys for that lock were nickel silver and were strong enough to force the plug to split after some wear. I still see them in my area with split plugs, the general fix is to replace them with a standard deadbolt.
camelgd

[Squelchtone]

dls: Please look in General Chatter, up in the Sticky area for this sticky: We need a sticky for users who picked or broke a lock in use



Squelchtone

[amlwchlocksmiths]

never have and i dont think i will ever break one.

[mhole]

KInd of - the other day I made the absolute classic Newbie error and dropped a master-key wafer out the keyway.

I was correcting a minor fault with a lock my company fitted, and wanted to check it worked with both the thumbturn, and key. Rather than call the customer down to check, I picked it and tested - all fine, so I then asked the customer to check it, only to find their key no longer worked.

The penny dropped when I saw their key was stamped 'master'. We rarely do any master keyed work, and nobody told me this was the rare exception, so I spend a anxious 10 minutes combing the floor until I tracked down and replaced the missing wafer.... oops!

[scriptguru]

I have few $1-$2 locks from dollar store, and after few dozens close/pick/close cycles now they are much harder to pick, and one of them is nearly impossible to pick. The funniest thing is that "broken" lock which I cannot pick anymore still can be open with key! It looks like I trained it and not it has a kind of immunity to picking

[dls]

This is what i was getting at probably a bad choice of topic name.
should have been something like any one made a lock pickproof by picking.
I have
I had a bird rim cylinder and could pick it with one pass of any pick even a double ball but after a while i couldnt get it at all even spp what i think has happened is that one of the pin chambers in the plug now has a burr and one of the pins cant fall down fully and its a deep cut pin ie. max dept or no lift

[Eyes_Only]

I've seen it happen occasionally. Mostly with really cheap locks that might have been made somewhere in asia.

[FarmerFreak]

Yep, I've broken locks by picking them. I've also broken them by using a good key cut to factory depths, instead of using the horribly worn out key that has been barely working in the lock.

When a lock is getting heavily corroded and a pin or wafer gets lifted higher than it has been lifted in years. They don't always come back down. Usually lube will fix the problem, but on occasion the lock will have to be completely disassembled to be fixed.

On regular pin tumbler locks there is always the chance that the last person to pin up the lock used a shorter driver than they were suppose to. And if picked it will likely be crunching up the spring and stretching it out around the cylinder until it is very hard to turn the plug anymore. There are a lot of old (no longer in use) Assa cylinders that have ended up in my hands. A lot of them were pinned up with the shortest Assa driver in every chamber. So yes, I have experienced this problem with everything from Kwikset to Assa.

And of course there is the previously mentioned problem with master pins coming out of the chamber when the cylinder is turned 180.

[dls]

the ones im talking about are all cheapo locks not the sort that any decent locksmith would master or build from scratch they where all soaked with wd40 and flushed clean and still wont pick so its time to pull them appart, one of them will be getting filled with thinned epoxy then cut in half

[074KU]

I am new to picking (< 2 weeks)

I also have a lock that no longer can be picked and plug seems to catch about 1/8th the way through its quater turn rotation after 30+ sucessful picks. However I read the FAQ before sticking my tools in any holes I would like to keep using and instead used a cheap Dollar Store, lock no harm no foul.

Thankyou Lockpicking 101.

PS. I now have a great excuse to try my hand at repinning a padlock.

[mhole]

If the cyl jams after about 1/8 of a turn it's probably a spring being pinched between plug and lock body. Once the spring gets bent it stops the bottom pin leaving the plug and dropping back into the lock body.

[074KU]

If the cyl jams after about 1/8 of a turn it's probably a spring being pinched between plug and lock body. Once the spring gets bent it stops the bottom pin leaving the plug and dropping back into the lock body.

Going to bore the retaining pins and have a bit of a look at the damage I have done.. Tho I have a bit of a worry that the plug is wrecked (oh noes my $3 lock! ) As on closer inspection the lock body is made of mild steel (painted with brass coloured hammertone paint) and the plug is very very soft brass (also painted with this same horrible stuff) can also scribe the brass with a saftey pin very easily

[074KU]

All the pins and springs were fine, as was the plug and lock body... however the spring that pushes the locking bar into place was all bent and mangled.. I have no idea how this happened as it is totally inacessable while the lock is all together.(prehaps just cheap and nasty?)