My own made picks are getting stuck in a lock.

[raimundo]

bi metal implies that there is a hardened metal on the toothy edge, and a flexible tempered metal that is the rest of the blade,

you just grind off the toothy edge, its hardened so filing won't work but grinding will then you make picks out of the flexy part.

common hacksaw blades that don't say bimetal on them simply have the flexy part gripped in heatsinking vice while the toothy part sticks up from this and gets flame hardended, you can even see the blue color on that edge on many of them.

Your locks are european, as we call them here in northamerica. with the pins at the bottom, these locks seem to have somewhat heavier springs, and a longer pin chamber in the 'bible' and some of them probably are susceptible to comb picking because of this.

North american locks that get mounted with the pins down can malfunction if the springs get beat down, and when the spring no longer pushes up strongly you can have a lock malfunction where the spring dosent push the pins far enough to get the shear alignment.
you do not have gravity to assist in this when a NA lock is malfunctioning in this way.

hacksaw blades tend to be about .o30" thirty thousands of an inch. sorry Im not metric, and cant translate that.

[Solomon]

Hi guys sorry for the late reply, have been occupied by work. Anyways, just a follow up observation. I've worked my way up to picking 4 pins now, and I realise that my pick has a gradual bend at around the shaft. I find that I tend to apply a little bit of pressure sideways on the picks when I'm feeling and pushing the pins up. Do you guys also encounter this issue of having slightly bent picks?

Nope. I can pick around a yale keyway with standard majestic or peterson picks no problem, they have a bit of flex but they don't bend. I mean they would if you really really tried, but they shouldn't under normal or even slightly heavy use.

Ditto for hacksaw blades, those things are tough. Although if you didn't quench them throughout the grinding process and you're going pretty heavy on them a lot then yeah, they'll start to bend out of shape pretty quickly. The first ever pick I made out of hacksaw blade bent quite a bit (and not even after that much use), but since I learned to quench them every 5-10 seconds I haven't had one bend or break on me yet. Even the one with the thinnest shaft. Make sure to quench your next picks regularly and go a bit easier on em when you're picking, that'll sort things out I reckon.