When I arrived, I looked at the keyway and saw that it was in the "2 o'clock" position. I turned the plug with my thumb and confirmed it was off the shearline. The hardware was on the right hand side of the door so it was on the locking side of the shear line. Checking that the door was not unlocked, I took out my trusty homemade plug spinner, spun it, and opened the door.
I called my friend and asked if she had anyone else try to open the door. She assured me that no one had touched the door. So I was wondering if someone with just enough knowledge to get in trouble tried to pick the lock without a plug spinner. Picking a lock for burglary seemed a little far fetched. Though, I thought the door may look like a target as it already had a realtor lockbox on it and could be seen as unoccupied.
Well, I went to work repinning the lock and just for the heck of it, decided to keep track of what came out of it. As you can see below, it was pretty amazing. Schlage 6 pin cylinder with 5 pins used. 4 of them a 1 cut and one a 0 zero cut. I found 3 construction bearings in the 4th side hole that would have made that a 1 cut also once upon a time.
I brought the pins back and put them in one of my locks and cut a key to see if I could get the plug to turn and then remove the key. Check out the key, it is basically a blank! I couldn't pull the key out when it was turned but I could open the lock with other random keys by raking back and forth.
As you can see by the dimensions of the pins, they are quite worn. Do you think that worn pins and a worn key would allow a person to pull the key out when the plug was turned? Or did someone actually try to get into this lock?
This was the worst pinning I have ever seen in a lock. And I assume this was a re-key because the face of the plug was silver but the rest of the lock was dark bronze. If some one handed me a key that looked like that, I would just laugh.
