Medeco Cam lock

[Dak]

I recently had the joy of purchasing a medeco 72s cam lock. I am having trouble with it. All the youtubes i have watched show people just raking it more or less and opening it. I can't seem to do that. I understand that there are no top pins and thus no shear line and because of that I just need to rotate the pins to the correct position. So My question is how do i attack this?

also i may as well ask this also
what does biaxial mean?

[datagram]

What are you using to rotate them? A bend half diamond is the poor man's approach, a faux-medecoder would be a bit more precise.

Biaxial means that the pins need to be lifted and rotated to the proper positions; they are working on two axis, hence bi-axial.

dg

[Dak]

ah alrite. I will have to bend up my half diamond also what is a medecoder?

[lunchb0x]

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=28558

I used one of the wire bristles from a wire brush, its small and strong enough to get into the grove and turn the pin but it is harder for pins further back in the lock, JK's tool shows you what spacing you are at so it should make it a lot easier to get the grove on the pins.

[Dak]

ah yeah i just saw that before you posted it. Thank I will have to do that.

I guess I didnt know what I was getting into buying this lock. I've been playing with American locks and serrated, spoorated pins for a while, but this is a new one for me. I cant wait til I can open it

[Squelchtone]

What are you using to rotate them? A bend half diamond is the poor man's approach, a faux-medecoder would be a bit more precise.

Biaxial means that the pins need to be lifted and rotated to the proper positions; they are working on two axis, hence bi-axial.

dg

That's what I always thought, but that isn't where it gets the name from.

Medeco locks, even the Original Medeco from 1970 had to have their pins lifted to shear line, and then rotated to Left, Center, or Right, in order for the gate in the pin to be aligned so the fingers of the sidebar could enter the gates and clear the cylinder wall to allow for rotation and opening of the lock.

Biaxial was something that came to be in about 1985 (from what I remember) and it was introduced for two reasons. Reason one was to extend the utility patents so that companies like Ilco and Jet couldn't make generic blanks thus circumventing restricted keyway security. Reason two, which may have very well been an unexpected side effect allowed under the new Biaxial pin shapes many more permutations of bitting differs in large grand master systems. If a typical 6 pin lock in the Original series had (6 pin heights) * (3 rotational angles) ^ (to the 6th power (based on a 6 pin lock) then the Biaxial locks which had Fore and Aft pin tips allowed for an increase in bittings to the order of (6 pin heights) * (3 rotational angles) * (2 pin shapes (Fore and Aft) ^ (to the 6th power (based on a 6 pin lock)

You may ask yourself, what the heck is a Fore and Aft? well, imagine a typical Schlage key. If you look at the cuts they are cut at the same distance from center to center along the entire length of they key. The cuts on a Medeco Biaxial key can be cut either beFORE the center of the cut or AFTer the center of the cut, and the chisel shaped tip of the pins will seat perfectly into those cuts.

If the Original Medeco angle cut pins were Left (-20 degrees), Center (0 degrees rotation), and Right (+20 degrees), then the Biaxial angle cut pins were the same angles but there were Fore Left, Fore Center, and Fore Right, as well as Aft Left, Aft Center, and Aft Right. That's a lot of words so medeco assigned some letters to each one and they are as follows:



I too was shocked that Biaxial doesnt mean lift and rotate, because then the name would actually make sense. Maybe its a word they had kicking around since the advent of Medeco locks in the 70's but didn't have a good place to use it until these new pin tip shapes were produced.

corrections and comments welcome,
Squelchtone

[Squelchtone]

ah alrite. I will have to bend up my half diamond also what is a medecoder?

http://www.medecoder.com/

jkthecjer, a member here, made this tool to grab pins and rotate them to proper angle. http://hackaday.com/2008/07/29/medeco-high-security-lock-picking/

Squelchtone

[Dak]

Thanks for the information squelchtone. Those angles mentioned for the the fore and aft pins match my key exactly! obviously astounding lol.

Im very excited. Normal pin tumblers i ahve been ripping through like tissue paper im glad this lock will beat me up a bit

my understandning is an abloy might be waiting for me at christmas

[greyman]

Dak, not sure if you know, but there is a pretty thorough write-up of Medeco in my book on locks (click my signature). There's also lots of info on LP101, but a fair bit is on the advanced listings, so you might not be able to access that at the moment.

As squelchtone has pointed out, there are a number of different Medeco variants, all of which require twist and lift on the pins: cam lock, biaxial, M3. As you noted, cam lock doesn't have driver pins. That doesn't mean it's easier to pick. In fact, it's less susceptible to the bypass methods they use on the Biaxial and M3 because of it.

[Dak]

y'know greyman i was just looking at your book. And I must say im intrigued I will have to get myself a copy. *jk* no where are those darn pirates you were ranting about */jk*