wa1ker00 wrote:I'm familiar with how to use the search function as well as the absolute gluttony of information contained here. However, I still want to have hardcopy books of as much information as possible since they are, in may cases, more readily available than an internet based forum.
The trouble is that there is no such animal, well there wasnt until recently when Deviant came out with his book. We've all learned to put this down on paper only in the last few years as the locksport community has grown big enough to share all this information and to see what works and what doesnt.
If you went somewhere like Delta Press or Paladin Press they always had those 5x8 pamphlets by Eddie the Wire on how to pick locks or bypass alarms, and those things were written back in like 1975 and are sorely outdated. There's the Steven Hampton book on picking high security locks where he uses a bunch of goofy named hand made tools, and it still doesnt explain a heck of a lot of technique. If you were a Filez guy in the 90's you had access to the MIT Guide as a .txt file but actual books on picking are slim. There are a couple PDF's floating around such as the Locksport International comic book style Guide to Lockpicking, and before Deviant wrote his book, there was always his Powerpoint slides available on youtube, but that's about it.
Greyman's (Graham Pulford) is more of a book that shows how high security locks work and their history, but not much on picking (still an amazing book everyone who likes locks should own)
This forum albeit not easy to search sometimes contains the most hands on user driven data available, more so than in any book. I wish there was a way to make a coffee table book of the Best of Lockpicking101.com and have all the sticky's and how-to's and photos and useful posts all put into a book. That would be something useful that one could keep on their shelf for reference.
If the Search here isnt working so well, go to Google.com and type in your term-you-are-looking-for site:lockpicking101.com and you may find much more than with the built in Search. Also know that in 2008 (if my memory serves me right) the lp101 database crashed and had to be rebuilt and a lot of older posts simply do not come up in Search.
I'm gonna have to pick up Deviant book and read over it to see if it's something we should be recommending. I know he's hot on calling a wrench a "torsion wrench" which I publicly and completely disagree with, and I don't want to see a new generation of pickers calling their tools the wrong names as compared to what we've been calling them for 10 years now. Granted that what locksmiths have been calling a tension wrench for 50 years isn't "technically" correct either, I don't think we have to get into a Star Trek nerd argument about the exact physics and naming terminologies of lockpicking tools. To that end I will say that I will always call it a tension wrench out of tradition, but when teaching new pickers I often tell them it's not actually correct because it is more of a torque wrench or turning tool, but it is not a torsion wrench. Torque means we are applying force to something in order to turn it about its axis, such as a plug in a lock, torsion would mean we are trying to turn the wrench so hard or the plug so hard that it deforms and turns into a helix. We are certainly not trying to damage either the wrench or the plug so torsion is simply not the correct term. This is what happens when IT people and engineering types think they're smarter than the locksmiths and lock manufacturers and know better what to call things because they took a college intro to physics class. But I digress..
Squelchtone
