kwoswalt99- wrote:Laugh at me now. You just wait.
But seriously, I know I really need to actually draw the things. I've been talking about them ever since I've been here.
Farmerfreak has already said that if someone wants to defeat him, they could just send him an abloy. He wouldn't even have the right kind of tools to defeat mine. I can't even imagine a tool to defeat them, nde that is.
Does he have a youtube channel? I can't find any of his videos.
I broke the lock I made, by the way, so now I have to fix it.
Obviously not having seen your design I can't speak for farmerfreak and say absolutely that he could pick it, but he is methodical and highly skilled. Probably more so than any other picker I've ever met. Farmerfreak, I hope you don't mind me saying that, and telling the following story.
Example: he'd seen pics of BiLocks online, but had never touched one, or a key for one. I had a few so I met up with him and brought a couple of mine. As I was digging through my briefcase a text came in on my phone but I ignored it until I found what I was looking for (I come back to this later). I pulled a BiLock padlock out of my briefcase and handed it to him, leaving the keys in the case so he never saw them.
For reference, this was around six years ago. As I recall, by that time there were a couple of people who had picked first gen BiLocks on youtube, but they weren't factory pinned, they knew the bittings, had practiced with the lock extensively and the locks were masterkeyed. Which if you're familiar with BiLocks, can aid in picking. Some doubted the vids were legit, but even if they were, for the reasons I just mentioned it wasn't exactly a fair test of the locks security. To date, no one had made claim to having picked one of the new generation Bilocks with an interactive element.
So anyway, Farmerfreak examines this lock, peeking into the keyway with a little flashlight while I look who texted me and I reply to the message from my wife about something. After a few minutes he opened the box he uses to hold his picks, rooted around a bit and finally picked out a pick he liked, a tension wrench that seemed to work, and went to work. We continued chatting for a while as he probed the keyway with his pick. I really didn't give the BiLock much thought as we sat talking. This generation of lock hadn't been picked and as far as I thought, he just wanted to fool around with it a bit. Conversation drifted to other things and I actually forgot what lock he'd been working on.
All of a sudden, he leans towards me, quietly puts the lock on the table in front of me, with the shackle open and the plug turned. I was speechless. He'd just been casually talking, didn't even seem to be paying close attention to the lock he was fiddling with. And here it was, picked. I hadn't been recording, I didn't even have a stopwatch running. Then all of a sudden I remembered that as soon as I handed him the lock I sent a text to my wife, so I grabbed my phone and looked to see how much time had elapsed since that text. I wrote the time down somewhere, I forget the exact time but it was right in the ballpark of 25 minutes. Picked blind (didn't see a key or know the bitting) the first time he ever saw a BiLock in real life, and had definitely never torn one apart before that time.
Folks, that's some serious picking skill.
A small number of others have now since picked that generation of BiLock, and it's been discovered that you have to be careful not to break off the center warding in the keyway with your tension wrench. After picking that first BiLock Farmerfreak went and made a custom tension wrench for their keyways which helps avoid breaking anything while picking. I left all my other BiLocks with him, and when I saw him a week or two later he returned all of them to me in a picked state.
Here's his casual announcement that he's the first person known to have picked this lock. Dude didn't even make a new thread for it.
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=43287&start=345#p388052I believe that if a lock can be opened with a key, it can most likely be opened with a pick. It might take a pick custom made for that lock, months or years of work and experimentation, and there are still a couple locks out there that as far as I know, still haven't been picked, but in my opinion it's just a matter of time.
There are some amazing lockpickers out in the world, some are in North America, some of them are from Europe, some regularly attend LockCon and some don't. I can't speak for the people I haven't met or directly interacted with, but of the people I do know, I don't know anyone who can pick better than Farmerfreak. And I know some fairly talented and impressive lockpickers. He's also designed a few amazing locks. Aside from disc detainer locks, if anyone can make a reliable, custom mechanical lock he can't pick, my hat's off to you. (I think that high-quality disc detainer locks may be his Kryptonite)
