I'm featuring the newer model in this post, but for comparison, here is a partly-disassembled view of an older model:
(Don't mind that one stray steel spring in the pinning mat - I didn't realize that was sitting there)
To see a fully exploded view of an even older style of this lock, Robotnik posted a very nice image of an 850 here:
https://www.lockpicking101.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=63017#p466834
(Though that picture does seem to be missing one of the two brass pins that hold the body together??)
You can see my reassembled older and newer versions side-by-side at the end of this post.
Let's begin.
The first step to taking these locks apart is to punch out the two pins on the face of the lock. I have seen people say you need to drill these out, but you don't. A hammer and pin punch is all you need to remove them without damaging them. If you look at the older models, you can see that once the body sheath is removed, the plug is retained by a small flathead screw near the bottom.
Now, it isn't necessary to remove the plug to fit a key or rekey these locks. Once the sheath is removed, you can simply dump out the pin stacks and decode, or just replace the pins with new ones, which is what I ended up doing.
However, let's say we want to further disassmble the lock in order to remove the plug, shackle, and locking palls. This is a bit more difficult on the newer models since there is not a nice flathead screw for us to loosen. Instead, we have this retainer pin seen here:
In order to remove it, I drilled a 3/32" hole in the lock body and halfway through the pin, then pushed the pin up with a dental pick, and grabbed it with some vise grips and yanked it out.
With the pin out, here we have the lock fully disassembled:
Now, that little pin I drilled into is probably fine to put back into the lock, but I have been having fun with the lathe recently, so I decided to make a new one.
For my stock I plucked one of these posts off a BEST actuator.
Measured out the exact dimensions I needed to turn it down to,
and ended up with this:
Not perfect, but it's usable. And here's when I made my big mistake.
I put the plug back in, tapped in the pin I made, and plugged the hole I drilled with a bit of lead shot. Whoops! I forgot to put the shackle and locking palls in first!
After kicking myself for a bit, I dug out the lead, drilled a little dent into the new pin, popped it out, and made another pin on the lathe. I realized that the pin doesn't actually need
to be tapered on both ends in order to work, so I just did one side this time.
Then I dropped my new pins in, cut a key, and reassembled everything.
Here it is put back together. I used some gun blue to darken the body pins and Yale logo.
And here are the older and newer models side by side.
I decided to polish the body pins on the older model and darken the pins on the newer model, for a sort of ying-yang effect.
The older model says "Eaton, Yale & Towne Inc." and "Made in U.S.A." on the shackle, and "SUPER PIN TUMBLER LUBRICATE WITH GRAPHITE" on the top side.
Hope you all enjoyed!
