Trouble with spools on specific bittings

[yepup]

Hi all,

I'm a beginner with a question. I've been experimenting with a Lishi SC1 and a few ABUS 83 padlocks with Schlage C five-pin cores. The ABUS cores have four spool drivers and one semi-serrated driver, and standard key pins.

What I've found is that depending on the bitting, picking with the Lishi is either trivial--open in a few seconds--or totally impossible for me.

The problem I'm having is that for certain bittings I end up in loops like: there are only two binding pins, both spools. After I set one, when I set the next it there's so much counter-rotation it unsets the first. When I re-set the first, it unsets the second. It's a never ending cycle.

The worst bittings seem to be ones with several pins that are cut the same, or nearly the same.

What do folks do in this situation? What are typical countermeasures? I can't seem to get past this no matter how long I experiment.

Thanks in advance !

[GWiens2001]

You will find that happens with normal picking, as well as with the Lishi. The three close bittings mean the three bittings are likely to be binding very close together. You might want to either pick by hand, or use SLIGHTLY more or less tension . More tension is likely to help more, but Lishi picks do not like to be tensioned.

Gordon

[yepup]

Gordon, thanks for the reply. I've definitely experimented a bunch with modulating tension, but to no avail.

So this behavior is particular to the Lishi tool, but not manual picking? I wonder why the difference.

I can successfully manually single-pin pick lower security master locks etc, but these cores are a bit of a challenge for me. I have had a few successes, but it takes forever and I feel like I'm leaning on luck more than method. Pick placement is a big challenge for me. I was hoping to get the hang of it with the Lishi and then move on to manual picking from there.

[GWiens2001]

It does happen with manual picking, but Lishi tools tend to be more fragile when tensioning with heavier tension.

Gordon

[yepup]

When you say the Lishi can't handle heavy tension, I'm guessing you mean that the pick itself is more fragile than a regular pick, and so doesn't work well when there's heavy tension?

I've re-keyed the core a few more times and I think I've come to a conclusion: when you're a novice dealing with a core full of 80% spools, the bitting matters a LOT.