034 How to make a new key using a Lishi decoder and cutting tool

hi this is fish and welcome to fish picks so here's the situation somewhere along the line i'd manage to give away or lose the key for this sparrow's cutaway lock it would be easy enough of course to just gut and re-pin it but i thought i'd take this opportunity to play with some new tools and see if i could make a replacement key without disassembling it [Music] now i'm not a locksmith or a red team pen tester and i'm sure there are plenty of elegant workarounds which i'll look forward to reading about in the comments i know for example that many of you may have fingers poised to type impression the lock in block capitals followed by several exclamation marks and this would no doubt be a great solution and it's a skill i'm hoping to develop over the next few months but for now i decided to explore a different solution based on my current skill set and the tools i own so first let's break the problem down into two phases phase one i need to determine the bidding for the missing key and then phase two i need to produce a working key from that information now i happen to know that this lock accommodates a five pin slade key which gives me a huge advantage in completing this challenge to tackle the first phase knowing this allowed me to use my sc4 lishi two in one decoder which is designed to work in schlage five and six pin keyways and this gives me some great information because this device allows me to pick but also to determine the precise height of each pin stack which it translates into the cut needed for each notch of the key so to pick it i just needed to open the arm of the decoder and apply light clockwise tension and then starting at the front of the lock i could see precisely which stack i was working on by following the horizontal scale and i could search for any pin that was binding based on the increased resistance i felt in this case on the first pass one was springy as were two and three but four was binding so i bought that to set and then returned to the front of the keyway for my next pass this time one and two were springy but pin three was binding so i bought it to the set point on the third pass one was still springy but pin two was binding and surprisingly when i brought this to set i secured the open given that i hadn't set pins one or five i could assume that these must be particularly long key pins that were holding the driver pins at or close to the shear line already to test that theory i rotated the core slightly and applied light downward pressure on each keypin looking to the small vertical scale to the far right of the decoder and we can see here that pin one is an eight cut pin two is a six cut pin three is a one cut followed by pin four which is a five cut and finally we have a deep eight cut again in the fifth position which gives me a bitting code of eight six one five eight to achieve phase two i now needed a set of space and depth keys for the schlage keyway this set kindly made for me by martin newton consists of nine keys each of which has five notches all cut to the same depth and with the appropriate spacing for this particular kind of lock so the number one key has all one cuts the two key has all two cuts and so forth i intended to use these as a set of master templates to produce the new key i just needed something capable of making precise knot shaped cuts and that's where this lishi key cutter came into play this hand operated tool has a two part blade that cuts a symmetrical notch precisely and cleanly provided the key blank is made from brass or a similarly soft material so first i clamped the number eight depth key so that it sat on top of the blank and was well aligned and then pressing the lishy blade until it was flush with the first notch i nipped the key blank nibbling away at the material rather than trying to cut the notch in one go this reduced the likelihood of bending the key in the process and it decreased the amount of pressure i needed to apply each time i then went on to make the cut for the fifth notch which you'll remember was at the same depth then i substituted the number eight key for the number six and made the notch for the second position i repeated this step twice more cutting to the five depth for the penultimate notch and then finally addressing the high cut in the third position for this number one cut very little material needed to be removed and it's always best to be a little conservative because we can always remove more but we can't of course add material back onto the blank so then it should have just been a case of cleaning up the edges of the key with some fine grit sandpaper to take away any burrs or rough edges and it would be time to test our new key in the lock now depending on the tolerances of the lock i anticipated that the key might need some fine adjustments to achieve a smooth core rotation so i had some fine files on hand and it's good job i did because initially i got no movement at all the challenge now of course is that i didn't know where the problem lay and so i searched up the depth specifications for schlage and i found this graphic which i converted to metrics so that my eurocentric brain could make sense of the numbers and with this information and armed with a set of calipers i was able to compare the target depths for each cut with the current notches on the key and it was at this point that i came to appreciate just how accurate you need to be in this process the differences between cuts is just 0.38 millimeters or 0.015 inches and it's so easy to create inaccuracies in this somewhat crude approach that i'm using in most cases i noticed that my notches were too shallow and so i needed to take away a little more material which was at least better than the alternative typically this involved four to six passes with my growbay number four round file on each of the five notches and once my caliper readings match the target depths i tried the key again and this time it turned smooth as butter so there we have it i was able to arrive at a working key without dissembling the lock by using the tools i had on hand and it took me about 15 minutes and would no doubt be even quicker with practice but the limitations of this approach are obvious the decoder i used here is not cheap and it's model specific while she also provide decoders for the american kwikset master and best lock ranges this would require an even more significant investment which is why i remain convinced that lock impressioning is a more versatile and cost-effective solution to this kind of problem i was recently lucky enough to watch martin impression a yale keyway from scratch in just a couple of minutes so impressioning can also be quick but i was aware that i was witnessing the result of thousands of hours of experience at play now i have now gathered together the tools i need to start to learn how to impression and i hope to share my experiences in future episodes but for now thanks for watching and until next time take good care

Channel: Fish Picks

Views: 24,424

Keywords: Lishi, lishi decoder, lishi 2in1 decoder, lishi cutter, lishi key cutter, Sc1 keyway, Sparrows cutaway lock, Sparrows cutaway, locksport, lock sport, fishpicks, fish picks, lock picking, lockpicking, lockpicking 101, lockpicking tutorial, locksport tutorial, locksmith tools, 2-in-1 pick, sc1 2 in 1 pick, lishi decoder sc1, sparrows cutaway practice lock

Id: TXwu04mWA_A

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021