Awesome alternative to Impressioning !

[Newkey_Oldlock]

I got sick of impressioning locks, especially older high value antique locks where I would cringe at the possible damage to the patina, pins, scratching up the keyway etc.
This is when it occured to me that there is a much easier, more accurate, and most of all way more gentile.
I came up with this device that transfers the pin height profile and spacing onto a piece of tape.
I built the base from a stair tread cutoff, then built the back wall and stylus carriage from scraps of pvc trim board.
I drilled a grid of holes on the left to provide a almost unlimited area to clamp just about any padlock in any position.
The padlock needs to be picked open and held in the open position. Locks with a strong tumbler reset need to be jammed open with a small piece of shim jammed against the lip of the tumbler and body. The lock gets mounted onto the transcriber upside down so all of the pins at shear are resting against the inner wall of the cylinder opening.
I made several different feeler hooks with varying depths and angles to work with just about every standard keyway.
The distance between the tip of the feeler hook and the tip of the .001 micro pen are equidistant as to make a exactly scaled bitting profile. The probe gets slid all the way to the back of the keyway and carefully slid out marking the height and spacing of every pin then rides the top of the keyway and drops out off the face of the tumbler. Then the probe gets lifted manually, marking the top and bottom of the tumbler face which provides a accurate face to align and square the shoulder of the blank with the keyway.
The sticker then gets marked square to the keyway and cut out with a exacto knife then applied to the key blade, then filed out.
I have successfully made new keys for a ton of locks with rarely one that requires a little additional work.
It works great, I just had to share it with the rest of the community. It deserves exposure ! As far as I know nothing like it has ever been created, you saw it here first lol !

https://ibb.co/YcHsv36
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https://ibb.co/w4BkqmV

[prevariikation]

This looks incredible! I'd wondered about the viability of this, and you built the whole thing out beautifully! Thank you so much for sharing this.

[Newkey_Oldlock]

Thanks ! Please share it around and maybe build one ! It's a wonderful tool for making accurate new keys in a refined gentile manner lol
I am addicted to buying padlocks without keys and making new ones. On nice older ones I even go as far as getting a cheap blank perfect then cut a period correct NOS blank and patina them to match.
It does my soul good making all those old keyless padlocks happy again !

[Betto01]

Would you allow me to reproduce it? Could you make a video of how it works to get an idea? Well, that's if you agree.

[demux]

Somehow I missed this thread when it first got posted, but what Newkey_Oldlock has basically made there is a generic Lishi decoder. Pretty cool. With only 8 posts in 2.5 years though, he may or may not be around anymore to answer your question. One of the admins might be able to see when he logged in last...

[billdeserthills]

Would you allow me to reproduce it? Could you make a video of how it works to get an idea? Well, that's if you agree.

I usually prefer to apologize over asking for permission but you do you