Do I HAVE to use a plug spinner if...

[Conquer]

Frequent lurker, first time poster. Great place you have here, lots of useful information!. Glad to be here and all that.

I have just purchased the Bogota Titanium Minis and am eagerly awaiting their arrival in the mail. Although if history has any say in it I wont be getting them any time soon. It seems whenever I order some tools it takes weeks to arrive for whatever reason. For the record I ordered them from Black Scout Survival 5 days ago only to receive an email saying they are on back order. I figured that much hehe

With that said I have a question regarding plug spinners that I would appreciate to have cleared up. Suppose I am raking a standard Schlage or Kwikset 5 pin & tumbler lock and I rake it the wrong way. From the unclear info I get on the net it seems as if the only remedy is to use a plug spinner or else you are dead in the water or have the original key that fits the lock to 'reset' it. I cannot see that being the case, so my question is, cant I just simply take my tools out and start over but torque it the other way? Or do I absolutely have to at this point use a plug spinner?

The reason I ask is because reading the info on the net it seems that if you rake or pick a lock in the wrong direction the lock becomes stuck and you then MUST use a plug spinner.

Can anyone clear this up for me? Clearly I am a newbie to Locksport.

Thank you in advance for your help and contributions!!

[catsoup]

Welcome!

You definitely do not need to use a plug spinner to reset a lock if you pick it in the wrong direction. You simply rotate it back to the locked position and start over in the other direction. You can do this with the tension wrench, or really anything - a finger nail, key, doesn't matter.

Using a plug spinner can save time, saving you from having to pick the lock twice, but is by no means a necessary tool in the early learning phases of hobby picking.

You can get a lock stuck 180 degrees rotated. That is to say, upside down. This can happen when you try to rotate the cylinder more than half-way round and the pins drop down into what is the bottom of the keyway. Normally the key fills this space and it is not an issue. If/when this happens when you are picking a lock it is easily remedied, either using the flat part of a pick, or really anything flat and straight and long enough to reach the bottom of the lock, you simply push the pins back into place and rotate. You can do it all at once since the lock is already picked and you are just pushing them out of the way. There is a good write up on this somewhere on the site that actually explains it a lot better, with pictures and all.

happy picking

[Solomon]

The only time you need to use a plug spinner is if you're unable to pick it in the correct direction for whatever reason, but it will pick open in the opposite direction and you need to turn it back. The idea of a plug spinner is that it spins the plug past the rest position so fast, that the driver pins don't have time to shoot back into the plug and reset the lock.

For example, a euro cylinder which is mounted on the right hand side of the door needs to be picked CCW to open, as the bolt is thrown towards the left. Some locks pick either way just as easily, however some will pick easier in one direction and there are some which are nigh on impossible to pick one direction whereas the other way they're not too bad. The bitting and binding order play a big part in this.

So let's say this lock is giving you grief picking CCW but switching to CW all of a sudden you're getting much nicer feedback and before you know it, pop she goes. Turning the cylinder CW in this instance isn't gonna throw the bolt because the cam is pushing against it in the wrong direction... the only way to turn it back past 12 o'clock again without relocking is to spin it.

If the plug gets stuck at 180 it's because the driver pins have enough space to drop into the keyway a little and "lock" it up. All you need to do is push them all out of the keyway simultaeneously with your pick, and the plug is free to turn again. A plug spinner isn't necessary for this because you're not really picking it at this stage, you're just clearing the keyway. Hope this makes sense