LocksmithArmy wrote:I thought a torque wrench was used to fix cars... j/k
It is, and with it you can adjust the amount of foot pounds that you will exert rotationally onto the wheel's lug nuts. I believe the pickers who use the term torque wrench or torsion wrench are trying to get away from using tension wrench, as tension is not the force we are actually applying when picking a lock. (Example: A bridge is something that is under tension, which means the deck of the bridge is being stretched length wise by the weight sitting on top of the bridge, or that the metal re-bar in it's concrete deck is pre-tensed or pre-stretched, which adds strength.) As you can see this has little to do with rotating a plug on a lock, but somewhere along the history of lockpicking and locksmithing someone coined the term "tension wrench" and it stuck.
I think it boils down to "I know what you mean" when someone says tension wrench. I use that term, but I also use the term turning tool when I'm explaining to someone how lock picking tools work.
For those of you who have never seen a torque wrench used to tighter the nuts on a car tire,
here's an example. You can mentally substitute the wheel for a lock, the lug nut for a keyway and the torque wrench for a lockpicking tension wrench, and there you have it, just a tool to apply CW or CCW/ACW rotational force so that pins will bind against the wall of the plug while picking (binding order), and when each is set, will rotate the plug just a small enough distance so the driver pins can't "fall" back down, and when they're ALL set, the lock is picked, and the "tension wrench" continues to rotate the plug so that the cam or tailpiece can retract a bolt, or rotate enough degrees to unlock whatever kind of mechanism they were designed to interact with.
Squelchtone
