about mushrooms

[placebo]

Hi,

Just a question ... what's your technique to identify and locate the mushroom pins of a cylindre ?
And once you have located them , how can you put them in position correctly ? Should they be pressed before or after the normal pins ?

Thanks in advance,

placebo

[Cherry Picker]

I'd say the simple answer would be to treat then like they're all mushrooms and remember that a feather touch on the wrench and some luck (or massive persistence) is required.

[Varjeal]

Almost any lock has the potential of having mushroom, spool, or serrated pins. However, some are more likely to than others, and some virtually always have some type of pick resistant pins. Best you can do is to study the various types of locks, and follow the advice mentioned before.

[placebo]

thx guys,
I'm already able to pick cylinder with mushroom or anti-picking pins, but the feelings given by those pins in single pin picking are different between cylinders of two differents manufacturers. So mushroom pins dont act in the same way depending on which sort of cylinder you are picking.

I thing there's no universal picking method,
but the use of suitable tools and a light tension seems to be the only advice people should take care of.

Thanks once again,

placebo

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[Varjeal]

The difference in feeling that your getting may be because of the actual type of anti-pick pins being used.

Generally, there's 3 types.

1. Mushroom pins. Have a tapered shape with the top being either smaller or larger than the bottom, depending on the manufacturer.
2. Spool pins. Shaped like an hour glass with little to no taper in the midde.
3. Serrated. Pins/wafers with slots in them to "hang up" on the sheer line of the lock to try and make you think the pin/wafer has been picked when it really hasn't.

Hope this helps.

[Eagerpicker]

I've come across spool pins. Boy, have I. The first lock I bought to practice on, the cheapest one I could find on short notice (about USD10), is still resisting all my picking efforts. I opened it after awhile to see how it was constructed, and there you go. It's a five-pin lock. Four of which are spool pins. (Double-ended spool pins, that is.)

My experience is that when picking a spool pin, the lock will have you believe it's opening nicely, by allowing the cilinder to turn. This movement I have found to be suspiciously abrupt, almost too good to believe. It is precisely that: you'll continue picking the lock, but when pushing down on other pins, the cilinder will seem inclined to turn back to its starting point. That's the spool pins doing their business. The only way to begin defeating them, seems to be to apply pressure on the key pin underneath the spool driver pin MILLIMETER by MILLIMETER. Very, very slowly, listening, feeling for the faintest click of change. That's when you're making progress, NOT when the cilinder makes that huge (by comparison) shift.

As Varjeal says: hope this helps.