horsefeathers wrote:I am not going to criticise heavily Bob’s course because I feel it offered a lot and was far better than those ebay courses, or those run in hotel rooms etc.
However, with hindsight, I must admit that many things certainly should have been covered. Picking of curtained locks, BS or not, was not covered at all. No mention of tools available to defeat these. In fact I came away thinking that the only thing that could be done to these was to drill them, using pinpoint drilling templates etc. Only relatively recently did I discover tools and techniques for overcoming these without using the drill - now have CB’s 5g pick, others to follow in due course. Plasticine and pin and cam kits were covered and practised with, but not on every lock that these techniques cover.
Maybe partly it was due to the fact that it was not one-to-one that limits slightly the training and time given. Of course teaching more than one student at a time means that inevitably some are slower at picking things up and more time has to be given to helping those get up to speed. So maybe not everything can be covered in as much detail as a single student would have liked (with hindsight).
Lock id was pretty much left to us to discover. No cd’s or catalogues given out. Shame!
I guess that looking back, the work done in the course could have been condensed into two weeks, the third week should have covered all aspects of mortice locks, picking and identifying, in much more detail. A week most definately not wasted.
regards
Hi Wayne.
It beggars believe that you attended a 3 week course and learnt very little in fact it sounds to me that you didn’t even learn the basics on mortice locks.
I was all set to attend a course with the BLA and then I discovered this site and at the time there was a lot of UN savoury things being posted about them so I decided to have a re think and went ahead with a 4 day course as recommended on this site.
I was given 121 tuition over the 4 days and it covered every thing using a variety of different tools and every decoder was shown and used, simple by pass techniques were shown and to think I paid a little over half of what you paid and was given a very comprehensive tool kit and other bits and pieces including a lock ID CD If I were you I would have felt very disappointed.
Get yourself a lock ID CD you will find it very useful but it will not cover everything. I was asked recently to open a back door for a friend of mine’s neighbour who had lost her keys and she was very annoyed because she had only recently had the lock replaced.
When I took a look through the keyhole I was a bit surprised as I expected to see a yellow legge as the house in question was an ex local authority, which normally fit legges instead I saw a blue cased silver curtained lock with no hard plate so I tried to insert my RB 5g curtain pick and it would not fit so I took another look and thought this doesn’t look like a 7g keyway so I tried the CB 7g pick and as I expected to small again I tried the CB 5g and no dice.
So I got my cordless drill out and enlarged the curtain slightly and then went in with the RB pick and immediately felt low levers so I then went in with the CB pick and got a feel and still no joy so I changed direction and tried picking the front levers working my way to the back and now things started to happen got caught in anti picks and started again and it opened some 2 minutes latter.
Fitted a new lock and everyone was happy I asked if I could keep the old lock and she said yes you are welcome to it and I took it home and it gives me a lot of pleasure playing with it as it can put up a good fight.
From what I have told you can anyone ID this lock? I think you will be surprised when I tell you
