by Ffojt » 15 Jan 2011 7:40
I thought it would be a good idea to share the experience I got from re-pinning my first lock.
I simply found, lying around in a friends house, a never-before-used, shiny new 7 pin lock he didn't know where it came from and never intended to use. I decided to re-pin it.
I used a knife to remove the circlip, and then I inserted the key. I turned it, and then I turned it back to remove the key. Of course the cylinder popped right out and all the springs and driver-pins where loose. Fortunately I didn't loose any of them. I dropped all the key pins onto the table and practiced putting the right key-pin in the right pin-hole to match the key. For every time I did it, I tried putting it back into the shell to see if it would work.
Then I put it back together with only one pin, but without any picks I didn't really got to do anything with it. I decided to re-pin it with all seven pins. Because I didn't have a proper plug follower I had to use the plug itself. I put the key pins in the right place, with the key, and turned it a half-turn away from the bible(s(?)) Then I used a pair of make-up tweezers to put all the springs in, and then one driver pin at a time. I used a clamp to hold the shell.
There were three different driver-pins. There were two regular pins, three spool-pins and two I've never seen before. They were kind of egg-shaped, a little like this () What are these called?
My biggest mistake were that I decided to put the hardest pins back in first. I started with the egg-shaped, since they were really hard to get a good hold of with the tweezers, then the regular and finally the spool-pins. I should have done it the other way around, because inserting the pins only got easier the closer to the side I put them in from I got.
Long story... I just hope some other beginners might read it and avoid some of my mistakes;)
Ffojt
