A friend of mine was throwing away a lock he had to cut open, so I asked it for toying around with. It's a 4-digit combination padlock with a really solid feel to its build. I've been trying to get it to open but so far I've had little success.




Applying pressure to the mechanism by pulling on the surviving part of the shackle does allow me to get some feedback on the disks, but I'm having trouble in understanding what's happening inside. It feels like that the dials are binding in some way at different positions, but I haven't seen the insides of these types of locks before, so I'm struggling. I tried to google for some cut-out pictures of the mechanism but failed -- does anyone here have a good feel on what is going on with the lock and how to 'read' it?