Pick size??

[bumpin88]

i have just been wondering. what is the absolute thinnest shank
one can make a pick with.

recently i put together a short hook, and the shank
sometimes bends.

it is made out of wiper inserts. should i try
and find better material, saw blades, spring steel, ect.. that may
may a bit more stout.

[datagram]

0.015" is about as thin as most picks will get while still being strong. The "thin" picks offered commercially are around 0.018 to 0.022, most normal picks are 0.023 to 0.030.

dg

[bumpin88]

thanks dg, that helps. but i should have been more specific. not the thickness of the pick, horizontally, but vertically with hook/diamond pointing up? sorry if this is what you were talking about
it just sounded like you were talking about thickness. i also was not very descriptive. thanks again

[datagram]

Ah I see. Technically you can make a pick that is flat or go all the way up to a full hook. Somewhere in between is the most useful, though. The flatter you make it the harder it will be to lift individual pin stacks without touching those in front of it. Just experiment, see what works best; there are no hard and fast rules

dg

[raimundo]

Look at a key, take a schlage C key for example, take the longest pin, the length of this pin extends into the keyway, but also through the part of the plug that is not in the keyway. So maybe you should take a plug and put different pins in it until you can look through the plug and see a bit of daylight above that pin. The height of a pin that shows just a bit of daylight above in an empty plug while looking through the keyway, would be the extreme height of a very large hook

Picks are not meant to fill a keyway like a key does, they are slim and made to manuver in the keyway, they can drop below the bottoms of the pins and go under them, they can angle in at the last pin and lift it higher than the height of the picktip above the pickshaft.

Picks should not be fitted to the extremes of height, within this small parameter, they should be shorter, shorter is because they need to get under long pins that are set at the shear, and sometimes do it in wicked paracentric keyways. Picks should not be designed for only one lock, keys do that, you need a tool that has versatility, these are found in the middle range of the necessary measurements,

Top of keyway to bottom of pin drilling is an extreme measurement,

when you find this, thats the upper limit of the pick tip, and forget it, just make picks that are near the mid range, a short hook is bottom of the mid range, while a long hook would still be shorter than the full measurement of the available space, it should be top of the mid range in that keyway.