so I just bought a medeco.

[south town ninja]

Open in Thirty Seconds, by Marc Weber Tobias.

Gordon

I just got it in the mail and can not put it down. Great read!!!

Can i borrow it when you're done?

[BSG_314159]

Can i borrow it when you're done?

I don't see why not! PM me.

If you want to add it to your collection it's only 40 dollars on amazon. Well worth the money.
http://www.amazon.com/OPEN-IN-THIRTY-SE ... 0975947923

[nite0wl]

Medeco locks are super cool, not the "gold standard" of high security locks they were before "Open In 30 Seconds" was published but still a huge leap from the usual pin tumbler locks that most of us enjoy idly picking between late morning shots.
Medeco has tons of keyways, they took the idea of restricted keyways and went crazy with it. There are a handful of very common keyways like the Liberty, and Gotham, and so on which were/are basically unrestricted (the individual locksmith still has to buy the blanks from a Medeco dealer until the patent protection ends and Ilco, etc make a generic clone) but there are tons of regional or time-zone restricted keyways, state or dealer restricted keyways, and customer restricted keyways. Plus the fact that the US DOD adopted Medeco cylinders for a lot of their high security locks which means plenty of government or DOD only keyways were created.

Even in their least restricted M3 keyway (Marc Tobias spends many pages complaining about the M3 keyway's added width) chances are the warding will interfere with easy use of a medecoder. The Medecoder is a great tool but it still takes skill and practice to use. Disassembling the lock and really getting to understand the lock's design and construction is key to any attack on a serious lock.

The simple explanation of Medeco mechanisms (Open in 30 Seconds and elsewhere in the forum, has more in depth analyses of most of the designs) is that almost all of them involve 'axial rotation'; that is the rotation of key-pins to a specific angle to allow a channel in their side to engage with part of a sidebar.
The original Medeco design used chisel-tip key-pins which had the tip essentially centered, BiAxial was the follow on design in the mid 1980's which introduced the idea of displacing the tip to the front or rear of the pin (essentially doubling the potential keyspace, as far as keys were concerned). M3 followed from that by adding a sliding blocker ("slider") which needed to be pushed into the keyway the correct amount in order to allow the sidebar to drop in to the plug.
BiLevel, KeyMark, and the other lower security Medeco mechanisms are still very challenging picks but lack the added secondary locking mechanism (ie rotation controlled sidebar) and tend to limit the allowed variations of cuts and pins in a mixed system which uses both high-security and medium security Medeco cylinders. Again, the Tobias books have much more detail (but much denser prose).

As with any other lock mechanism you have encountered for the first time, try to practice with it as a progressive cylinder. Medeco even makes repinning it easy for you by capping the pin stacks of most of their cylinders with grub screws.

[GWiens2001]

Don't forget that the Medecoder does not work on ARX BiAxial pins. The ARX pins have the bottom of the groove capped off on all but the 1 and 2 depths, so there is no groove for the Medecoder to grab ahold of.

Gordon

[BSG_314159]

Don't forget that the Medecoder does not work on ARX BiAxial pins. The ARX pins have the bottom of the groove capped off on all but the 1 and 2 depths, so there is no groove for the Medecoder to grab ahold of.

Gordon

I have not taken apart my medeco in side my 951. Do the 951s come with ARX pens?

I guess the best way would be to just open it up. I read that the military started putting these in the locks as per request. Most people on the military know very little about locks and less about the pins. ARX should be stock in all new medeco cylinders.

[GWiens2001]

My 951 (from you!!!) has some ARX and some old-style.

ARX used to be all Medeco used once they came out (except for depths 1 and 2). Of late, they have started slipping in a mix of the old style pins. Probably because they are cheaper to manufacture, and Medecoders are now rare. And they even one or two ARX pins in the cylinder will mean you have to pick the pins to the correct rotation.

Gordon

[nite0wl]

My 951 (from you!!!) has some ARX and some old-style.

ARX used to be all Medeco used once they came out (except for depths 1 and 2). Of late, they have started slipping in a mix of the old style pins. Probably because they are cheaper to manufacture, and Medecoders are now rare. And they even one or two ARX pins in the cylinder will mean you have to pick the pins to the correct rotation.

Gordon

My understanding is that there are few cylinders that will have all ARX pins. Between the limitations of ARX (any chamber with an ARX pin cannot be mastered and ARX has height limits) and other considerations (cost, etc) there were few to none all-ARX cylinders coming out of the factory, more common was one or two ARX pins in a given cylinder. Locks on the secondary market are likely older and less likely to contain ARX pins (too many e-bay sellers are competent enough to dump the valuable parts out of a core but not good enough to deliver a smoothly running cylinder). After the ~2006 disclosures from King, and Tobias, etc, Medeco started including one or two ARX pins in a factory cylinder (initially only on request) before making them more or less standard. Your BiAxial cylinder might have been in service an unusually short time or have been serviced in the past decade by someone clever and competent but I would always doubt my tools and skills first. [I might be a bit self hating and misanthropic at the moment given a fight with an Abus 74].

[MBI]

ARX comprised a group of features that could be added to Medeco locks to improve their resistance to picking, decoding and destructive entry. They were made at the request of the certain government agencies, including the military which uses Medeco locks for securing nuclear weapons. The system was never widely advertised and not intended for sale to the public. They made ARX brochures but if you were not part of a govt agency and tried to order locks with ARX features you usually just got the runaround.

ARX pins are just one of those extra security features. It used a different and more expensive method of pin manufacturing. Regular Medeco pins have the sidebar and false sidebar grooves cut into them by broaching. Basically sliding them across a cutting blade. If you've ever seen a video clip about making locks, it's just like the way they cut the keyway into the plug of a lock. On ARX pins instead of broaching they mill the grooves into the side of the pins with very tiny bits, so they can control the length of the groove. It means more machinery, more man-hours, and more time in production. It's a feature that came into use in the 70s on the pins in the original model Medeco locks, to defeat a certain type of decoder that was introduced. It later went out of use in order to cut production costs when they felt those decoders were no longer a threat to their system. When Biaxial was first introduced, it did not use the ARX style of pins.

In July 1994 they started making the ARX system available (primarily to govt users) and as a part of that improvement system, for the first time those milled grooves were used on Biaxial pins. That style of pin groove had previously been used on the earlier model of Medeco locks for a number of years, just without the ARX name.

After a few years of production of ARX features, they unceremoniously shoved the milling machines used to make ARX pins into a back corner of the factory floor, and basically forgot about them. They just didn't feel they needed the machines anymore so they weren't even properly mothballed and greased up to prevent corrosion while they sat disused. They had an adequate stockpile of ARX pins but since they only used them for government customers, by request, they weren't going through them very quickly.

It was during the summer of 2008 that Medeco resumed production of ARX pins. This was a direct response to the release of information on Jon King's Medecoder, and the publication of Open In 30 Seconds by MWT around the same time. They refurbished the old pin milling machines used for making the ARX pin grooves and resumed production. However, they had many many millions of regular Biaxial pins already made, stockpiled at the factory which they weren't going to let go to waste, and are cheaper to produce than ARX pins. So, when they started making ARX pins again it became standard policy at Medeco to install one or two ARX pins in all new Medeco locks leaving the factory. It was felt that was sufficient to prevent use of a Medecoder to open Medeco locks. That was around August 2008, give or take a month.

If you have a lock manufactured after that time, you should theoretically have at least one or two ARX pins in your lock. Nothing's guaranteed though. If that lock was ever worked on or repinned, perhaps by the locksmith who originally sold it and a customer requested his locks keyed alike, you may not have the ARX pins any longer. Medeco pinning specifications also say you need to include at least two mushroom pins when pinning Medeco locks, but not all locksmiths bother to do it. Even when coming from the factory, I've seen them come with only one mushroom pin. It's because the mushroom pins are only available in certain sizes. Medeco uses balanced pin stacks and depending on the bitting of your lock, it just may happen that it doesn't use the size pins that are available as mushroom pins. You can fudge on their balanced pin stacks and go down a size on the top pin without generally causing any problems, and that's what you're supposed to do if needed to make sure you get those two mushroom pins in there, but honestly when you get pinning quickly, not all locksmiths bother to check that one tiny detail.

If you're interested in the time frames during which ARX and and other various security features were used in Medeco locks there is an article about it in NDE Mag #4 which has a few more details than I listed here. I know I've restated some things already mentioned in this thread but it's easier for me to write it out as a complete narrative without trying to cut out factoids that have already been covered. I apologize if rehashing some of the facts annoyed anyone.

[BSG_314159]

You guys are awesome and this forum rocks!!

So I will stick with picking my government medeco's dating pre 94' for right now. Then I will start messing with the ARX pins.

[Squelchtone]

Great write up from MBI!

If anyone wants to look at the 1994 Medeco ARX literature, here's a PDF http://highsecurityconsulting.com/lp101/Medeco-ARX.pdf

Enjoy!
Squelchtone

[MBI]

You guys are awesome and this forum rocks!!

So I will stick with picking my government medeco's dating pre 94' for right now. Then I will start messing with the ARX pins.

Not all govt Medecos you run across will have ARX pins, only the ones used by agencies who knew about ARX and asked for it. Most govt locks I've run across so far have not had them.

I learned to pick Medecos before the Medecoder so I had to figure out my own way to rotate the pins. With the way I picked them it didn't matter what kind of pins it has. Originally I tried a hook with a groove I filed into the tip, similar to the pick in the image in my sig at the bottom of this post. By placing that groove against the chisel tip of the pin you can get some control of rotation as you lift the pin. In the end though I found it was easier to just use a hook pick without that modification.

I had one well polished, thin hook I used for Medecos. With the interesting geometry of the tips of the pins, depending on where you place the tip of your pick on that pin, how you tilt the pick to the right or left, and whether you push or pull slightly as you lift it, you can rotate the pins with just a regular hook. No need for a Medecoder. I still kept around the hook with the groove in the tip because if I ran across a Medeco that was giving poor feedback, the groove on the tip was useful for wiggling the pins back and forth to test them to see for sure if the pin rotation is set in the false groove or the real groove. I usually didn't need to resort to using it though.

My favorite Medecos to pick are the m3 locks. The keyways are so wide it gives you a lot of space to maneuver with your pick and the slider really doesn't hinder picking at all. Most of my tension wrenches couldn't stay in the keyway very well since they were so wide so I ended up making my own custom Medeco wrench just to accomodate those super-wide keyways.

[nite0wl]

Thank you MBI for providing much more detail than I had on hand and some great advice.
Tensioning a Medeco (of any vintage, generation or keyway, but especially the M3) is a tricky business because of the width of the keyway. Most that I have in my collection can be tensioned adequately with a thick PryBar but even that can flop around a bit, a custom tensioner or some added bracing is useful.
If you do have any ARX pins in your lock a Medecoder likely will not help you, at least with that particular pin, finding some other tool in your kit that can rotate the pins would be essential in that case.