Review: The Nat'l L'Smith The Ultimate Technitips Collection

[Jacob Morgan]

The National Locksmith presents The Ultimate Technitips Collection, Copyright 1997, no ISBN, 308 pages, 8 1/2" X 5 1/2".

This book is an assortment hints submitted by readers of the National Locksmith magazine. A locksmith ran into a sticky problem and found a clever work-around, and then sent the tip into the magazine. This is one of the collections, and Professional Locksmith Secrets Revealed was apparently another (I do not have a copy of it, so that is a guess). If this book had an index it be much better. To use it as a reference, the best one can do is have a stack of small post-it notes and make a set of tabs for any page of interest for later quick-reference, or maybe pencil in topics and page numbers inside the front cover. This book is sometimes offered as a freebie incentive to sign up for two years of the magazine.

Contents (groups of articles):

1. Car Opening
2. Domestic Cars
3. Foreign Cars
4. General Automotive
5. Locksmith Tools
6. Padlocks
7. Mortise Locks
8. Lockouts
9. Lock Service and Repair
10. Installation Tips
11. Door Control
12. Safes
13. Picking and Impressioning
14. Modifying Key Machines
15. Misc.

The first 100 pages are automotive related, and being a twenty year old book a lot of that is out of date. The rest has some good items. At times it is a little bit like reading the "Day in the Life of a Locksmith" thread here. I can not understand why it has no index. The gun smithing equivalent to this book, the Brownell's Gunsmith Kinks series, not only include indexes but have cumulative indexes so looking up something in volume four will list where the topic is, if it exists, in all four volumes.

The National Locksmith sells the book for $39. I do not think it is worth that kind of money, but might be worth keeping an eye out for on eBay or Amazon.

[billdeserthills]

I recently received this book after renewing my subscription to The National Locksmith for a 2 year period. I was interested in this
book, because it was compiled by Jake Jakubuwski who has passed away. He used to be the technitips editor and I always found him
to be a real locksmith's locksmith, as Jake had an interest in helping locksmiths to earn more money with his experience.
However as you point out, this book, along with many other technitip-type books is mostly full of old, outdated info that most lock-
smiths will never find a need for. It still makes decent reading in the bathroom, while I await more Mad and Cracked editions to arrive