Any Advice?

[Polish]

Ive read all the FAQ's and everything, and have been lookin at this forum for a while before i fonally decided t post. i bought myself a "defiant" deadbolt and ive opened it with full pins (5) THIS MORNING.

since then ive managed to open it 4 or 5 times, but i find that if i leave it alone for a hile and cvome back to it, i can open it in abput 40 seconds. if i try one after the other, i cant open it again no matter how hard i try...

for now im just messing around with the key part of it, holding it in my hand.

i still have a bit of trouble deciding which pin is stopping it from turning, but i can get it open by trial and error.

whats your guys advice? its like i cant fit my pick (i made it out of hacksaw) under pin #5....it gets stuck or something


anyone ever heard of these locks??

regards, polish

[Polish]

also, once i have the deadbolt screwed into wood and everything like its supposed to be, id imagine the amount of tension you have to apply greatly increases....but im worried this will sstop the pins from droppin back down...

[Iceberg_Slim]

defiant is a knockoff brand of kwikset, its of crappier metal and parts, it is basically worse security then getting standard kwikset, it has no security pins.
you would not need more tension then standard tension to just pick the pins, but you might need a bit more tension to acutally throw the bolt back and forth.

[mfschantz]

At the risk of serious flaming, I'm going to attempt to answer the second post. As you operate a lock with a key, you're turning the key so that the cam (tailpiece) at the back of the lock engages the bolt, throwing the bolt into the locked or unlocked position. If the cam were perfectly engineered to the bolt opening mechanism so that every machined piece was constantly flush , then yes, you would need more torque because you'd not only be turning the cylinder, you would also be pulling the bolt incrimentally into the open (unlocked) position as you picked. This is not the real life case. The spaces between the cam and the edges of hole into which it fits are enough that the torque to throw the bolt open is not applied until you've already picked the lock. This means that you can pick it normally with the light touch then turn your wrench harder to open the lock once the pins have all been dealt with. You will notice this with the key. As you begin to turn the key, it doesn't actually pull the bolt until it's rotated a little bit.

To address the pins dropping back down: The pins will always drop back to their resting position after setting the top pin unless you have overset the top pin and the binding force is transferred to the bottom pin. If this is happening, you are pushing the pins up too quickly or with too much force. Slight pressure pushing the pins up will allow the plug to slightly turn once the cut reaches the shear line and further upward motion of the bottom pin will be blocked by cylinder.

[freakparade3]

Read and follow Digital Blue's beginners exercise, it will greatly help you in figuring out which pin is binding, and the ammount of tension needed.

[raimundo]

as he lives in virginia, what he means by top pin is bottom pin. if he had lived in europe, then read it like he wrote it.