[525] Soviet Car Gas Cap Lock Decoded

this is the lock-picking lawyer and what I have for you today is a really interesting Soviet automobile gas tank clock what makes this lock so interesting is not the mechanism which is really simple and relatively easy to open but it's this locks place in history and I'll get back to that in just a moment but first let's take a look at the paperwork that came with this lock these large letters tell us that it is a lock made for an automobile gas tank and if we flip it over you can see there are a number of pieces of information that can be filled in by hand at the factory including the price the assembler but the only two that are actually filled in are the serial number and the date of manufacture and the date is the really key piece of information here September 25th 1991 if you know your history you know that was in the closing days of the Soviet Union and it was also during one of the worst fuel shortages in the country's history a fuel shortage so bad that by this time about half of all Soviet airports were closed because there wasn't fuel available for the flights so what we have right here is a fuel tank lock made for people to use to secure their fuel supply during one of the worst fuel shortages in the country's history and that's why I find this lock so interesting if we look a little further over on the paperwork we can see the model number the word car cough which is a city in the Ukraine and I believe where this lock was made and then the word lesk which means luster or shine and I think that's the name of the company that made this we see this symbol right here which is or could be a stylized Cyrillic B that's also right in the center of the lock and I think that goes along with the word blessed if we flip the paperwork over we can see that this was made for four jiggly cars jiggly was the name of a car company in the Soviet Union except for models ba3 2108 etc so apparently this would fit all jiggly cars except for these four models then we have the instructions which tell us to rotate the Rings until the two numbers of the combination are lined up with a mark here and then the two halves of the lock will come apart so let's take a look at the lock now we can see the clamshell design has two halves that are designed to fit around the fuel tank filler cap and because we have these two shelves here it can't be taken off that cap until the two halves are taken apart and if we look on the front we can see two rotating rings if you line up the two digits of the combination with this little mark right here the two clamshell halves will come apart and then we have on the side the price of the lock three rubles forty kopeck and that's something that you find pretty often in Soviet made locks let's open this guy up now we have a combination f1 which I had to decode and if we look at the back of these rings we can see that it has a bunch of false gates cast in place and then two true gates which line up with these two little I guess fences you'd call them when the correct combination is dialed in and it actually looks like someone manually went in and ground those two true gates into place after the the rings were cast so a really interesting construction one where someone had to manually set the combination permanently I suppose you could set an additional combination if you had a file but that's how this is made so let's see what it would take to decode one of these locks we'll put it back together and I found that the easiest way was to pull the two halves apart and just find any gate for the outer ring and then the inner ring you can find a little bit of movement and what I would do is just move it along same little bit of movement a little bit of movement and then we get to the correct one there is a lot of movement it moves a lot more and that means we're in the right spot and then at that point we essentially just go around and we brute force it and there's only I don't know 20 some combinations it doesn't take long to figure this out let's see I happen to know the combination so that makes it I guess a little bit easier but you can see it comes apart pretty easily it shouldn't have taken someone very long to decode this just because you can feel pretty easily the difference between the false gate and the true gate in any case that's all I have for you on this soviet automobile gas cap lock made for jiggledy cars a really interesting lock that was made during one of the worst fuel shortages in soviet history and a fuel shortage that contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union so certainly a sign of the times and a sign of things to come in and what I think was a really interesting time period so that's it for now if you do have any questions or comments please put them below if you like this video and would like to see more like it please subscribe and as always have a nice day thank you

Channel: LockPickingLawyer

Views: 1,407,836

Rating: 4.9505916 out of 5

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Id: NhVR7gOSXPo

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/DarthBadGuy]

Wow, this was really neat, thank you for sharing.