Heya- you could call me a noob, or worse. I know almost nothing about lockpicking, but I've got this box that needs opening. I think there are some old drafting tools of my grandfathers inside, no malicious intent of course.
And now I'm really interested all of a sudden, but I can't even identify what kind of lock it is. What do you guys think?
I know its old, but thats about as far as I can get. Any tips to set me in the right direction would be great!
If you checked the stickies you would have found some info. Here's one of the stickies that you might find helpful: viewtopic.php?t=10743
The forums are loaded with information you've just got to look for it. I haven't used the search function in a while since it seemed to be acting up, but you can type "site:lockpicking101.com " (without the quotes of course) into google and follow that with your search terms.
take a foil wrapped piece of chewing gum and press it on the barrel key hole, take that impression to the various antique stores and ask at each one if they have a cigar box full of antique keys, find all the keys that have a wide enough barrel and buy them, from there, you can try them out and possibly impression or otherwise cut to fit.
these old barrel lock lever tumblers are not usually so complicated, only a one to three lever pack. and its quite possible to just find a tryout key that will work, although sometimes they may have a little trick to how they work, so be sure and use the key in a jiggle to find out if it works that way.
Thanks for the quick replies- it was kind of hard to look for information when I wasn't even sure what kind of lock it was. I'll definitely play with it for a bit, but if that fails I can always take the spine out of the piano hinge in the back. You guys are good!
Heya its open! Drilled out and cut down another old key I found, messed with it until I could get it to work Some neat stuff inside and I'm glad that I didn't have to beat the box up too bad. Thanks for the input!
