Key duplication

[Chronos]

Just for the experiance I suppose. I know there are probably more effective ways to duplicate a key, but I just wanted to see if I could do it with household stuff.

[HeadHunterCEO]

Just for the experiance I suppose. I know there are probably more effective ways to duplicate a key, but I just wanted to see if I could do it with household stuff.

i hear that

[David_Parker]

Yeah, I just ordered the CIA Field Key-Casting Manual.

It talks about using Cerrosafe as the metal material used for process. Hopefully, we'll see how easy it is to make duplicates, FOR LEGITIMATE PURPOSES.

-Dave.

[Kith]

Good job, i'd say you got out of it pretty much what you were looking for - thanks for the pics from your site, this was a nifty little trick

But I have to ask - why make the 3d mold and pour the solder in from the top? - picture this for a sec:

You get a 'lil square box, not unlike the one in 'The Italian Job' as aforementioned...except maybe a little thicker and you do not need the top half...but you do need one side to have no ...well...side

(make sure to omit one of the short sides and keep both long ones)

so basically you have a box with a floor and 3 walls with no roof. (filled with clay)

place the key on top of the clay with the bow right on the edge of the clay, and evenly push the key down through the clay to near the bottom.

(optimally you would carve out a thin channel near the center of the key beforehand so that the clay didn't get pushed outward from the key as you depress it)

Remove the key very carefully, not nicking or touching either side of your depression.

(if done correctly you now have an oversized impression of the bitting ...say 4x to 5x the thickness of a normal key)

Now you can wall off the fourth side of the box you left open to make your depression, and (carefully so as not to damage the impression of the bitting!!) pour the solder into the mold and let it cool/harden.

Now you have a thicker 'fake' key that you can take to your key-cutter that should be a bit more resistant to warping or bending while you cut.

Also, it may make sense to only cut the key close to the actual bitting and file it the rest of the way to make sure you get a good working copy on the first try...i've never tried a solder key on one before but im fairly certain the key-cutter would not be gentle.

I was intrigued by the experiment and am posting this in an effort to contribute to a topic I think is cool - and am not in any way endorsing criminal activity. I know this goes without saying posting @LP101, but sometimes it helps to clarify and this seems to me to be one of those times.

By the way - what type of clay did you use? You seemed to get a good impression from it.

[jessopher]

As for low melting point metals, the copper/zinc alloy that pennies are made out of melts at a relatively low temperature, which a cheap butane torch (or cigar lighter) can produce easily. Seems like pretty resilient stuff too.

Bismuth, and indium both have pretty low melthing points too... and if you want to get really fancy, alloying them with gallium will get you a range of metals that melt anywhere from room temperature up. Indium and gallium in particular arent 'household' materials, and are pretty costly, but pennies are pretty common (and cheap). Bismuth is pretty soft stuff, and if you cast a key in it, you probably wont beable to use it directly,. But its not that expensive.

pennies, you have to be a little cautious with though, as molten zinc oxidizes pretty fast. Ive played around with melting down and casting penies a little, but i havent yet tried it with keys. 'Theoretically', it should work.

[raimundo]

I have a few pounds of bismuth wire, I forgot the melting point, but if a key were cast from it, The thing to do would be to make a copy on a key machine with the correct blank
Jewelers routinely use ransom&randolph casting investment for lost wax casting, usually from a wax positive made in a rubber (vulcanized latex) mold or from a silicon mold. You cannot cast a kruggerand this way and get a good copy though, because as the metal goes from its liquid state to its hardend state, it shrinks a bit. but for a key, you probably could get a copy that would work. Modern lost wax casting requires hundreds of dollars worth of equipment, a casting centrifuge (you could build one cheap) a vacumn table to suck the air out of the investment mix, usually with a vibrating tabletop at the same time, and a burnout kiln, In short, a jeweler could make a key this way, but its not worth the investment to set up the shop to try it once. I believe that the process of vulcanizing a rubber mold produces a rubber mold that shrinks the cavity size when the model is removed, so some of the shrinkage in the process could be eliminated by using silicon molding compound, also silicon molding compound does not require the vulcanizer machine, a press that heats and pressurizes the rubber. Silicon molding cannot be done on any material that has touched sulfur, so when casting from a master that has been used for a rubber mold, the silicon will not set, because traces of sulfur are in the surface of the metal. Sulfur is part of the latex, and it is forever on the surface of any master created this way. But if you made a silicon mold, you need no equipment, just good technique, and you could have a jewelers service make the wax and cast it.

[ConceptShawn]

I figure if you just press one side of the key (flat) into the clay and remove it and let the clay mold dry for a few days then you could pour plastic or low boiling point metal into the half a clay mold... then take the copy to a key cutting machine and use the right blank and you should be able to cut a key from that I would imagine. I just think that trying to mold both sides is never going to work because getting the key out will change the shape of the mold probably every time.

[unjust]

there's a sand casting method used for sterling silver and pewter a good bit.

mroe or less you put your origional in a bin of pounded sand, place a flat object above it and whap it a few times with a hammer.

while this would only result in one side of a key that's enough to cut a proper one from it.

of course at that point, so is a celphone cam and a piece of gridded paper.