Trying to build a lockpick gun, But drawing a blank...

[Akio]

Okay, I'm a fairly new member to Lock Picking 101, and I was wondering about making a lockpick gun, I have had my fair share of experience in picking locks (mainly those to cabinets, with paperclips and a multitool) however; I was wondering if a could design my own lockpick gun.. I have had a few idea's, but I really don't know about materials, size, or the overall design, I was wondering if the good people could help me out here a little bit, if anyone has some blueprints, can think of a list of materials, I would be appeciative, I only have a few conditions.

1. I want the pick to be interchangeable
2. there must be a torque wrench in the design that can be used at the same time as the pick

3. not really a rule, but more of a statment, if you think something sounds cool to add to the design, add it, I want to hear as much as possible!

[Gordon Airporte]

There's quite a lot of info here on various pick guns and their mechanisms:
http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/138/48

[paulvalente]

Why must the tensioning tool be incorporated into the gun? That does make things a little more complicated!

However for the sake of argument, the way that I'd fulfil the spec on your post would be to build a pick gun manual/electric from a guide on the site. To achieve the one-handed tensioning you desire I would obtain a tension wrench which is round in cross section (apart from the blade of course) You could make this from welding rod. Then I would sling this under the body of the pick gun, in a similar style to the way that ram-rods used to be attached to muskets. It should be free to turn with the blad end bent in such a way that it ends up near to the blade and may be inserted into the keyway at the same time as the pick. For applying tension, you could simply bend the other end of the tension wrench and apply tension with the finger you're not using to pull the trigger of the pick gun. You could even get really flash and try to spring load it!

Well there you go, best of luck!

Cheers

Paul

[cottonmouth]

One of the problems of picking with an electric gun is the timing of the tension. Too early and the pin don´t move, too late and the upper pin are beyond the shear line. That means no success in either case.
A tension wrench that is operated by the pick itself would be nice to have. It would have to incorporate a unit to turn the plug, a unit to take the impuls of the pick gun, a unit to couple both former units with a variable angle. The plug turner would have a reverse lock, a turn limiter and an optional spring load in the locking direction. That way the timing of the turn could be adjusted and after unlocking the plug would not be returned to the locked position. The problem would be the adjusting of the timing as it needs to be fine enough and easily adjustable. I thought about using neodymium magnets and rotating or oscillating non-magnetic discs for the coupling. This would allow to have strong intermittent coupling without wear as they avoid mechanical contact.

[raimundo]

I have tried to design such a thing, the thought had was that a strikeing hammer driven by a coil spring first hits the needle and bounces the pins but goes on to strike forcefully on a tensor handle that will drive it around and the two strikes can be mechanically set to happen in sequence the timing of which would relate to certain distances traveled by the strikeing hammer between the first strike at the needle and the operating the tension from the same kinetic energy that hit the needle

I don't have a final design.

it would be best to put the tension at the top of the keyway if it is to rotate around an axis, this axis should be as close to the same line as the axis of the plug,

normal blade tensioning is somewhat offset from this axis but that is only how it holds the plug, the rotation still is around the only axis that allows it.

[pickmonger]

There actually is a pickgun that was developed that has various tension wrenches that can be attached.

The pickgun has 2 grooves cut in one end that permit the attachment of a clip that holds the tension wrench

The tension wrenches were actually the blades of keys that had been
ground down enough for both the tension wrench and the vibrating picking
blade to fit in the plug.

The tension wrench was therefore customised according the the lock that was to be opened.

The Agency Pickgun was issued to CIA types and it actually saw active service. Keith Melton has excellent photos of it in his book The Ultimate Spy.

The Agency Pickgun is also fully explained in the book Pickguns by John Minnery.

The device could be made to work extremely well. Unfortunately it had a rather high learning curve and the skills learned were not really transferable to other tools or techniques.

Here are but 6 of the zillion patents that show the various approaches to designing a pickgun

Try google or failing that go the uspto.gov and use the search engine

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