Home made picks

[Mad Mick]

Hi Everyone,
I'm relatively new to this hobby/sport/profession, and have done quite a bit of research over the 4 months or so since I became interested. The M.I.T. guide was particularly useful, as was Greg Miller's lock picking guide. Another informative piece was written by D P Phenix. By trade, I'm an Automotive Technician (Glorified Mechanic) and am called upon frequently to retrieve keys from inside locked vehicles using the general motor trade 'lockout kit'. However, having spent numerous occasions at the roadside in the pouring rain, trying (and eventually succeeding) to open some absent-minded motorist's car, I wondered if it would be easier to defeat the lock rather than the mechanism. The answer to that is no! Automotive locks (European) are usually constructed using double-wafers, with serrations on the edge of the wafers, combined with serrations in the voids of the housing, which causes premature binding.

Undeterred, I decided that I wanted to pick locks anyway, and faced with the plethora of picks available, I wanted to try to make my own before shelling out my hard-earned cash. The first ones I made were from old hacksaw blades, which seemed to get very brittle from grinding, and snapped pretty easily. Maybe that's from the usual newbie mistake of too much tension/force on the pins......you tell me.

Anyhow, the next ones were made from a freely availabe resource........wiper blades! Don't throw away your old wiper blades, strip 'em down. The two metal strips alongside the rubber blade make excellent picks. These are actually made from stainless steel, and you can get 8 decent-sized picks from one 22inch blade (2 strips). Heat-Shrink on the end of the pick makes a comfortable handle.

I have made :
1 1/2 round pick
1 full round pick
1 1/2 diamond pick
1 full diamond pick
2 hook picks
2 snakes

all from 1 wiper blade. A 2nd blade can be used to make tension wrenches, whether you want the standard double ended wrench, or a feather-touch wrench. If you want a feather-touch wrench, just put an s-shaped bend in the shank (or something more exotic).

These home-made picks have opened Master and Kwikset locks in as little as 2 seconds.....or as much as 1/2 hour, depending on your mindset. If you want to be able to open locks, you want to be able to 'feel' what's happening. There are very subtle movements of the plug, felt when a pin 'breaks' at the shear line, which you must be able to pick up on. There's no greater feeling than when that last pin sets, and you achieve what you set out to do.

I have read many posts since I became interested in picking locks, and realise I have many, many things to learn, but this site seems to be the most friendly, informative and intuitive site I have found.

Please keep up the good work Guys, if I've made errors here, I'm sure someone will correct me.

Many thanks for all the info in your previous posts.

[hozer2k]

Did you dunk the pics in water after a few seconds of grinding? I have a few pics that were made with hacksaw blades and have not broke a one...so you may have been applying too much force.

[Greg]

I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who thinks heatshrink makes a great handle!

As for the hacksaw blades .. they work great.. but like the previous poster said - you need to dunk it in water to prevent the brittle thingy
I didnt.. but then I took a long time on the grinder, and ground away any discoloured metal.
Basically I made the same mistake, but was lucky because I took my time

And with the hacksaw blades I can push really hard on it and it wont snap or bend (unless you bend it sharply sideways, which you shouldnt be doing when picking anyway)
The only one I bent was because I wedged it between two metal pieces in the lock and pressed WAAY too hard (I thought the one was a frustrating pin and I got annoyed after picking it for over an hour... it turned out to be that metal bit at the end of the pins)

Oh.. and welcome to the forum!

[Mad Mick]

Thanks for pointing out about the quenching every 3 secs...........I should have done it more often than I did. Maybe I was in too much of a rush to make some picks, and 'get to work'.

I actually bought a set of picks after having used my home-made ones for a while, but found them to be too large to fit in the keyway of some of the smaller locks, i.e. luggage case locks. The wiper-blade picks will fit in these locks with room to spare, and also work very well on the 'normal' sized locks. The set I bought was the LT620 Grand Master Lock Pick Set from LTI Tools. The main reason for this was because there were plenty of jigglers etc. included in the kit, as well as the standard diamond, 1/2 diamond, single ball, double ball.................The jigglers don't seem to work for me though. Maybe I'm using too much torque. Maybe I made a bad choice? Could someone please advise?

As I mentioned in the previous post, there are features built into the automotive wafers that bind the lock as soon as tension is applied to the plug. There must be a way of picking these type of locks, but I haven't found anything yet which describes how to do so, so I'm back to manipulating the control rods etc. I hope someone here can shed some light on the subject.

Thanks in advance,
Mad Mick.[/img]