Identification of a Chateau Lock

[gwt]

I found this lock in my house. The owner of this lock is long gone now, since I live in a student house. I couldn't find a key to go with it.

I wanted to ask if any of you knew the model of this lock.

I'm a beginner at locksport, so I'm having trouble picking this. The keyhole is a lot smaller than the practice lock that I bought. It barely fits tension wrench AND the pick at the same time (using the feeler.) There seems to be 5 pins in this lock, and i have a hard time going around the 4th pin. I think it just means the 4th tumbler is really low. What do you usually do when you have a keyhole so small that you can't maneuver around? The shape of the keyhole is also giving me a hard time.

Here are a two pictures of the lock. I had to take them with my cheapy phone because I can't seem to locate my camera at the moment. I'll give you guys better pictures if you need it (when I find the camera.)

[gwt]

Update: It says 44mm on it, and I seem to be having more luck using the snake shaped pick. Still haven't opened it yet.

[Kasmd73]

I'm fairly new to this myself but I love this type of puzzle and spend far too much time doing this every day. In regards to your question, Southord (add .com for web site) sells slim picks. Their mainly for European locks but would work in this situation. Also you can try a smaller tension wrench or try to angle the pick to about a 45 to 60 degree angle to try to get by it. Another possibility is put the pick in first then the tension wrench. If all else fails use the hook pick with the angle closest to 180 degrees (ie straight) and try to get under it. May not be good to get the driver pin above the shear line but I've encountered that with an old lock I found and one of the above always works for me.

[Engineer]

You might find raking this a little easier. It will depend on the bitting, whether a rake will do it or not.

The reasons for the very "wavy" keyway, is to stop picks from getting in there very easily. So they usually make the bitting on the key go from very high to very low to make raking as well as picking not very effective. This means shallow hooks and rakes will not be able to get one of the pins. I found very thin picks were a help, but eventually I had to make special "micro picks" just for these sorts of keyways.

[raimundo]

thanks engineer, I always thought the warding was to keep out other keys from different brands of lock.

[Engineer]

Raimundo, you are right as it does both just as you say. When you try picking a paracentric lock, you realise that such an odd keyway does a lot more than keep other manufacturer's keys out. At least that is how I came to realise that having an "offset" as close to the deepest cut as possible had the advantage of making a lock more difficult to pick, by severly restricting access to picks.

I don't know how others cope, but I had to make "micro picks" just to deal with such keyways. That's when I discoverd they (the ones I have anyway) all had something in common. They all have a really deep cut followed by a really shallow cut near the back of the lock. So you had to push a pin quite high, without lifting the pin in front of it very much. Again, makes them very hard to pick.

This does limit the number of possible keys a lot of course and it's why "try out" keys can work on some locks. However, with a deep offset, you still do not have enough room for jiggling a try-out key very effectively. So you end up SPPing, or raking if you are lucky.

The only downside I can see for the lock manufacturers is that it makes the key look like it has a really deep "groove" in it and so weakens it a bit. It can also make obtaining blank keys more difficult and with some of them, you cannot cut them reliably on normal machines.