I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it wasnt a simple matter of grinding off the protruding rivets and popping off the plates. Once i had the 6 rivets off and i tried to do some prying i realized two things, the rivets were countersunk into the bottom plate requiring me to go deeper than expected. The second surprise was that it appears as if every plate is also connected by a pattern of four embossed divots (will require more disassembly to confirm this). This was not an easy lock to peel, the rivet pins were reasonably hard and the plates were quite flexible, this combined to make it very difficult to remove the two plates to get to the cylinder.
Below you will see the security pins infesting this lock. Im pretty happy about this personally as ive really been struggling with spools for awhile now and i have opened up this lock quite a few times. Chalk that up to personal victory-yay!
I was hoping to be the one to discover some glaring flaw, like a simple bypass technique a la the american bypass tool. Well, thats not going to work with this lock. The tailpiece fits snugly into the cam (?) that lets the ball bearings do their thing- the lock is open when the plug is turned and thats the only time.
and finally, the commando lock bares all:
in the next pic you can see the four press fit embossed divots i mentioned, they are in a square pattern around where the lock goes (in the blurry part).
