I've been wanting to get some TOK tension wrenches recently, so when I saw a street sweeper passing by my block, I knew what I had to do...
Sadly, it's not like a pry bar, it's just a very short regular L wrench, but it's been working well so far!
Here's how I did it:
1.) Grab yourself a street sweeper bristle. They sometimes fall off, find a street sweeper and follow it until you see one snap off. My town has a map of the sweeper schedule, so you can also just look where you know they've been recently.
2.) Your bristle is probably all rusted and dirty, but we can fix that! Grab some sandpaper and get to work.
3.) Shiny...
4.) Here comes the hard part. You need to grab around 5mm of metal from the end with your pliers, and bend it 90 degrees. Chances are you're going to go through a lot of metal here by breaking pieces off, but there are a couple of things you can do to make it easier. The first is to grab a larger bit of metal from the end. This will make it harder to break, but you might have some extra wrench sticking out of the keyway when you use it. The second thing you can do is start over at step one with a different bristle. Some bristles are more brittle than others, and will bend more without breaking.
5.) I like to put a bend in the handle of the wrenches. To do this, grab two vise grip pliers, place them 1-1.5 cm apart, and bend 90 degrees. This adds a nice place to rest your hand, and makes the tool a bit more bendy.
6.) ???
7.) Profit!
side note: I finally beat this lock today due to this wrench. The bottom is way too big for tension there, but once I got the tension going, the pins were easy : )
All of the full-res images here
Probably nothing new to a lot of you, but I hope this helps someone!
- doublez
