copy a key without a key

[zeke79]

Yes, you can do clay molds of the keys and kits are sold to do so.

[jimmysmith]

what about some type of home made hardening material...well not home made. just not designed for this specific application.....someting that will fill the space, harden. and turning out hard enough to vice down on in my machine. and copy..

what kit are you talking about,, do you have a link....brand?

[zeke79]

It is called a "clam kit" . Sold by lockmasters I believe.

[raimundo]

I have made essentially that reader that you describe, and I can tell you that the pin the the stylus moves on and the slider along the rail are the weak points of the design for handmaking. that is because you cannot really control the tolerances well when handmaking. the slider must ride the rail and not input its sloppy fit to the decode result, and the pin that is the axis of the stylus must fit the hole in the stylus very tight so that it does not add its sloppy tolerance to the tolerance of the slider. perfect fit is the requirement of this tool.
On the other hand, perhaps a tool that does not need the slider, a set of six fixed styli each on its own chassis to determine the depth of one collumn of pins, each one put in, and the pin read, then then next one put in, to make this tool well, you would need to get dimensions from all the usuall locks, and perhaps find a way to adjust it for small increments,

[Spike666]

If you can pick it you can inspect the pin lengths and try a few variations of key depths by code. most of the time in kw, sch, corbin, sargent I can have it in 1-2 blanks. best and arrow well anything small format is tough to read 6-7 pins, also if it was repinned with lab you can check .005 and.003 general lengths in color and cut a key by code.

[WOT]

If you can pick it you can inspect the pin lengths and try a few variations of key depths by code. most of the time in kw, sch, corbin, sargent I can have it in 1-2 blanks. best and arrow well anything small format is tough to read 6-7 pins, also if it was repinned with lab you can check .005 and.003 general lengths in color and cut a key by code.

The lab colored bottom pins are the most retarded thing ever for icore service in my opinion.

[whiteknight38]

Color is unfortunately not a reliable indicator of pin depths, because different pin manufacturers employ different conventions for coding. LAB for example, uses green pins for Schlage bottom pins, to help distinguish them from the pins in the adjacent trays, but OEM has a different system, and uses different colors for pins of identical depth.
Consequently, since I have pins from both manufacturers in my pin kit, I have a mixture of .270B pins, (to use a random number,) that are both green and purple.
A key depth-guage, will give you the depth codes for each individual key cut, but that presupposes you have the original key.
Disassembly of the lock, and reading each pin with a set of callipers, will aslo give you the numbers, but that presupposes you have access to a code-cutter.

[raimundo]

I wonder if there is a simple pass,nopass, machine to sort pins by length, like some of those change counters that sort small change as it falls through various holes. so that when you need a pin of a certain length, you could put a small group of unsorted pins into it, and then easily find the one of the length you require.

[Deathadder]

yeah, you could have a scale thing like the change counters. All you would need to setup is a little seesaw like thing that the more weight a pin has, the more the seesaw lever thing drops. Different holes would be at different heights perpendicular to the lever. You would have to have different counters for different types of pins though, such as spool, mushroom, serrated, ect.
Also it would have to be very precise in order to tell such a small difference in weight.

[zeke79]

For the couple dollars that 100 pins cost I just toss used ones. No sense in sorting to me.