‘The Clam’ Key Casting Kit Review

hello again it's lock noop and today we get to look at thing which I wanted to do a review off for a while which is a key casting kit and this one is the clown which is vent key casting kit and this is the large kit it comes in I think about three sizes and well what does it do well it actually allows you to make a cast copy of a key which I will hopefully demonstrate for you in minute you can see it comes with its own instruction book as well so that's always very handy so what do we mean by casting a key well if you have limited access in terms of time with a key or maybe you have some keys for which it's unreasonable for most people to be able to find blanks for so what sort of these strange skinny ABLOY esque type blanks from a soviet-era lock and and these not quite spiky way keys I won't be able to find a key blank for these easily if it's all frankly so if you wanted to make a duplicate of one of those keys you need a way to have a go at doing that right so this therefore is the answer it's a key casting kit which is some yeah of a tongue twister what do you get one to get some modeling clay all strange stuff if you and hopefully will become clear in a minute get some talcum powder there kind of stuff you put on your baby when you're changing them and got a little tea light which whilst romantic isn't using a romantic purpose here we have an awesome little melting spoon for these really cool little pouring edges on there what else he gets in here you get some woods metal the infant feels metal this is woods metal which is a low temperature a melting point metal in fact I believe it's 70 degrees cent great so this actually melts at 70 degrees which is pretty awesome little spatula again which has a use and last but not least the actual casting shell itself which is here and some stickers that should you wish to label it with the mold if you're in say in the field and doing a couple of things might want and had a couple of bees clam shells and you need to have a couple of keys you model to label this up so that you've knew exactly which key it was that you're doing cast off and they go so it got a little dust cover on that witching take off and then there is the inside you'll notice that it this is some kind of I guess the plastic of some kind and you might thinking molten metal plastic well actually except this melts at 70 degrees by the time you poured it it'll cool down pretty rapidly and so you know and of course the clay itself will have a some insulating properties it's very unlikely to damage anything made of plastic and a lot of the casting multi you can see out there are plastic and also you can get 3d printed ones so that just shows how the temperature actually just isn't an issue so very very cool right I might move this kit out of the way so that we can actually have a go at demonstrating how this works so the first things that you're going to need are a lock for which there is a key that you wish to duplicate and I've just chosen this well I guess it's ash lake style key because well I'll be perfectly honest for demonstration purposes I reckon this will give us the best chance of getting a nice clean cast then we have some modeling clay the suggestion in the guide is to use about an inch of this so I'll just go and by the way this is so cheap this stuff and certainly you can't reuse it so they give you a little bit to get you started but should you do a lot of key casting you're probably going to want to get a bit more of this and and it really isn't special stuff you know it's just a kind of modeling tape kids use and then what you do is you massage this and stick it into the casting mold which you'll notice has two separate parts to it which I'll come on to in a second I've now got that modeling clay in its mold in both parts you notice that it's very lumpy it's not level it's it's not smooth it's nowhere near where it needs to be now event recommend that you can use the spatula to go across and flatten this out which you absolutely can do I think that's also you can I'm using the nice round handle here of this melting tool and using its a rolling pin and that will get that nice and level if you're not getting this really level then you probably don't have enough modeling clay in there which is fine because I think we'll probably have some excess in this side so just going along and anything anything that is excess on one side you can just take off the handle and push in to the other side so now you can see that I've got this very flat I'm not so worried about these parts for a treat and I'll show you in a second but got the clay in there I've got a bit of overfill either side and again that actually is an advantage so I haven't removed that it's really nice and level and this is where we bring in this baby powder or talcum powder or whatever that you want to call it and you just need to tap on a little bit of this this acts as a release agent stops the two sides from sticking together allows you to prepare this clamshell in advance so that you can maybe prep it the morning before or the night before you need it and this will mean that it doesn't all stick together and then you just need to brush this on you can be you don't have to be just don't be too liberal with it you don't want to too much of this you just want to make sure that the surface is nice and coated like this so that when you push it together it does release reasonably reasonably nicely I think that'll be enough you don't to saturate it with this powder just enough so that when you close it you can open it back up again and I just noticed I might have a little bit too much down here for that purpose so I'm just going to scrape that away what we're going to do is we're going to pop the key on here and just tap it down a little bit to get it in place but don't push it down because that won't help anything just sort of tap it to get it in place then what I've got here is a salt this is a tip on the you can lock support form I don't know who posted it but just take a bit of a paper clip and run that to the edge of the key like that and that will act as a as a vent so I'm just going to just push that down a little bit and that will act as a vent when I close this up so what that's going to do is it's going to stop a there we go I'm an air bubble forming now haha this is a bit where you need to get it just right is to push this down and close it up very firmly and try to get very even pressure on it because what you're trying to get this the whole thing absolutely as close as you can on both sides really closed up and it does take a bit of pressure but it's worth it because what we're trying to do is place it get that a really nice even cast of that key where the key is central to this mold and what you want is that about half the key to be on one side of the mold half a key to be on the other side of the mold I'm hoping that I can now pull this apart gently there we go and release that and hopefully ya got really nice cus that side a nice little air channel there and this is what that paper it was for is for an air channel to select some of that air that gets trapped in here come out and then what you do is just gently rock that key out without disturbing there we go the mold too much I'm hoping we'll see we've got a very very nice cast there okay so you'll see that we haven't sort of broken through here in terms of that little air hole so I'm just going to gently do that there and we've broken through that should be enough to vent it anything else we need to do at this stage yes so now here we can close it back up and you can make this bit of clay into a little funnel because that's where we're going to be pouring molten woods metal and once it's like that then I'm just going to apply a little clamp to it on one side and that will also stabilize this like that so I can then pour stuff in so we'll keep it closed and it'll allow me to pour stuff into it so let's just yeah tweak this a little bit I've played around with these clamps basically you don't need necessarily need the clamps if you can hold it and then heat and pour that's absolutely fine just having these clamps loosely don't like squeeze it tight you'll deform the mould just a holding it very loosely together actually allows like a tripod effect which will just make it a lot easier for me on camera to pour stuff in so that's very good so yeah I just want to show you the ends of this woods metal to show you the crystallized structure and also I've done is I've broken a lump off and I will hope that that will be enough to cast had a bit of a dry run with some - melting her to melt that in as well so be a bit more yes it's um it's really interesting stuff so woods metal has a melting point of about 70 degrees centigrade it does contain a bit of cadmium and lead so you want to be careful not to heat this up too much you sorta melt it get it nice and warm should I say without it kind of producing lots of vapors you can buy this in a lot of places fields metal is another alternative or bit a lot more expensive I believe it doesn't contain cadmium and so you might want to choose that if you doing placements um I guess it's all up to you I don't know if what you think that I really like sort of metallurgy and and the crystal structure of this just look at the underside is just beautiful so hopefully you can see I'm just keeping this over the flame this this metal just melting away and I want to get this good and hot because you don't get it hot then what will happen of course is you pour it into the mold and it'll set as soon as it hits that modeling clay naturally you don't to get it scorching hot for you know and smoking and producing those a vapor for the safety reasons that I talked about earlier but you do want to spend some time getting this nice and warm if you're using a jet flame then of course that will probably quicker but I wanted to use what was in the kit already we're using this tea light which albeit not quite as fast not quite as hot it should gets us to where we need to be so I'm gonna say we're good and hot and we're ready to to pour so in we go and I hope that that is enough so what we need to do now is wait for this to completely cool down and then we'll be able to read some old so again just have to be patient give it a couple of minutes and come back so let's have a look that's all look babe let's hope ahead of now there isn't always 100% transness working out correctly we can only hope for the best just move that side that side gently gently tease that apart okay that's not too bad okay looking - not too bad there look at that see and can you see where that vent here has worked to allow the metal that's allow all that metals get to the bottom with no air bubbles at all and yes you will have to sort of snip that off with a pair of pliers or just a Knick with a penknife we'll have a look at that your thing is to note that you might get some flashing here up just muttering the camera some flashing like that which you'll know just have to clean off with a small blade and you can see some here as well that is a hundred percent to be expected nearly every time you do one of these in any mold now what it didn't cover it's worth covering now is if you're in the field you can capture or obviously the mold there but you might not have the profile so if you did have a key blank that you wanted to cut from this of course all you do is just insert the key like that that will give you a negative of the profile and the warding on the key like that then you can look that up in a KeyBank catalog again that can close up you can open up it's not going to lose that impression and that's what that's for it's not necessarily for casting I'm sure you could pull something if you wanted and but it'll give you a negative of the actual blank itself so you get the profile and choose the right sort of key itself so in choose the right blank it's very cool right let's see if I can just remove this there we go nice and we should be able to just snap this bit off like that and then I'll clean up the edges with a pocketknife which I did have lying around but typically for now I need it it has disappeared open it here is and and then you can just clean this up so I'm just gonna clean up some the flashing on the underside like this to make sure the term it goes in nicely there we go and this stuff should be so sort of thin and brittle it should just chip off for the most part there we go a bit flashing on here like that mmm that's looking very very clean though very clean so I've cleaned up all the flashing there was a nice little Ridge just along the back here in particular which I've just removed it's actually really really easy to do just like I said just run this isn't hard metal so you just run a firm knife blade across the back like that you want to get it nice and smooth just check there isn't anything in between all of these cuts and well let's compare it to the key so I mean you can't add anything to this right so if you don't cast it properly then you have to start again and that includes you know probably can't use this clay it's got any cracks in might be ah to get another cast out is if you're lucky but yeah you end up with a key which looks like this hopefully I said you can't add anything to it and even if you over clean it actually you might you know change some of the lifting depths and let's have a look so line it to the key I mean that's pretty nice isn't it like I said if any of these are too short you'll have to start again you can't you can't add material to it really get one chance you can't correct it once you've done it it's not a big deal you just have to take care when you do your cars then you get it right now the proof of course is in it working so let's have a go look at that nice and just to show you that we have captured the bitung correctly I should be able to show you all the pins on the inside at least the key pins because that's the most important thing they'd have to be at the right height oh I've lost her and lots of driver pin doesn't matter we don't worry about those for the purposes of this we just want to check that all those key pins are at shear and they are so I think that is a very very successful test so what do I think of the clam well I mean just look at the quality of the casting you can get from this kit I mean it's clearly very very capable it's good that it comes in different size again small this is a large thing is an even bigger one and this clan kit comes in at again the prices will change over time no doubts but erm 133 euros 46 cents which is around 121 pounds 150 to US dollars like I said you gotta check the prices in the exchange rates on a daily basis to see what those prices will actually be but I've had an awful lot of fun with this now clearly this will appeal to locksmiths these called pen testers but I know that loads and loads and loads of lot supporters love casting keys and I can tell you what I can absolutely see why why because it's really really awesome fun and it just is you know I'm actually going to try to use the same kit to do some coin casting with my eldest son and you know and I can even teach him about you know low melting point metals like gallium which I think has is it's 25 degrees a melting point and that's so cool obvious you can't cast with this I think no that's a lie you could cast for this but it's be so so soft a bow think you'd actually be able to use it in a practical setting but it's so cool isn't it so yeah just somebody's interested in science and metallurgy as well as locks bought keys and casting in general by IFC have had the most fun messing around with this kit I genuinely have anyway so if you are interested in the clan do go check out the links below in the description see which of those kits might appeal to you the most like said I've had a great time playing with it I'm really happy with the cast's are magic it out a bit and I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you all next time

Channel: Lock Noob

Views: 8,200

Rating: 4.9146667 out of 5

Keywords: Lock, locksport, lock pick, lock picking, locks, Padlock, open, pick, picked, picking, lockpicking, locksmith, fun, cool, spp, single pin picking, gutting, gutted, how to, guide, tutorial

Id: 6RaEqSbthbo

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020