[636] Bowley Lock Analysis and Update

this is the lock-picking lawyer and what i have for you today is an update on my progress with the Boley lock this is by far the most requested lock on this channel and that's probably with good reason I think it's very clever and also very unusual now usually when a lock is this hard to manipulate open it's due to some extreme complexity often involving lots of small and delicate parts not so with the bully lock what they did was mash together cutting-edge technology from about a thousand years ago warded locks with cutting-edge technology from a hundred years ago pin tumbler locks now either one of these technologies would alone be pretty trivial to defeat but together they form something that is far better than the sum of its parts so that brings me to the punchline I am NOT going to be opening this for you today what I'm going to do is talk about a couple of the approaches I've tried and have not worked and more than anything I'm hoping to add to the body of information out there for other people testiness now while we're at it I will briefly talk about the only reliable way that I can think of to open these and non-destructively but it does require two skill sets that I am still developing we're also going to talk about something that I don't usually discuss and that's the lock set that comes with this cylinder the reason I'm doing this is because there been some changes made in response to feedback from the lock sport community that's something that I absolutely love to see so we are going to highlight it finally I was given permission by Ryan Boley to talk about a new product from the company that has not yet been announced and won't be available for a little while but it is something that is really cool and something that I can't wait to get my hands on so let's start by talking about how this lock works and what makes it so special now it's a relatively unusual lock to work you actually do need to get used to it what you do is insert the key after which you rotate it 180 degrees when you hear a click you then have to insert it a little bit further and once you hear that click you can turn it and at this point the tail piece on the back starts moving to withdraw the key you don't put it to this position where you would think you to remove it you actually have to turn it exactly 180 degrees from that pull the lock pull the key out rotate it back down and it will finally come out now that's a pretty unusual mechanism for unlocking it but it's something that you do get used to after a little while using it so this is just a five pin pin tumbler lock if we slide this cover back you get to see what that looks like so let me do that because as we're talking about this lock I'm going to slowly start disassembling it okay here are our five pin chambers I'm going to yank these Springs out and we're also going to dump the pins okay I made a little bit of a mess of that but I have been working with this lock long enough that I know we're pretty much everything goes okay if we take a close look at these you can see that there is nothing unusual at all with these pins in fact I think that's one of the benefits of this lock and that's that a locksmiths can service it and they don't have to buy any really unusual or special pinning kits I know with other locks like let's say the acid twin or multi locks or Schlage Primus it does require some very special and very expensive pinning kits so very very nice idea just to keep things where locksmiths can service this easily without making a large investment now we only have two security pins in here it's one spool and one serrated and if this were a normal lock I think opening this would be trivial for an experienced picker but I can't even reach these pins and I can't touch them because of the wording now usually when I talk about warding I'm talking about tiny little bits of metal that make up the locks keyway but here I mean a huge wall that blocks access to the pins so let's take this apart a little more and take a look at that wall there's actually two significant design elements first we have if you look inside of the main lock body you can see a cylinder that extends back from the face of the lock and let's look at what the key has to do to avoid it we insert the key like this and you can see that cutout in the key fits right into it before the key is facing upward and can actually engage the pins now imagine how you would get to that with a lockpick essentially it's impossible because of this piece of stainless steel in between the key way in the front and the pins up here then we have a spinning cylinder a spinning cylinder goes around that piece in the front of the lock and let's look at how that interacts with the key you can see that the key turns that cylinder around now that does a couple of things first it prevents the pins from dropping down to the inside of the lock body but second it highly restricts any tool path to the pins it's the combination of these two design elements that makes accessing the pins with a tool very very difficult and even more so since you need to fit two tools recall that we need tension on the core to pick and the only convenient way to tension the core is that tiny little notch all the way in the back of the keyway so very very difficult to get to so let's talk about ways that we might defeat this seems pretty clear that we're going to have to use some kind of tool that is shaped not too differently from this key so first there is bumping you might think that's the easiest way but there are a few pretty significant obstacles first you can't make a bump key the way you normally would by filing each notch down to its maximum depth the reason you can't do that is because you only have about 50 thousandths of an inch of front to back play once you insert this key into the lock and turn it around so it's facing the Pens so because of that to make a bump gate you would need to use really tiny bumps and you would need to offset them forward in the key or this way in the key and to do that you would actually need to to have a lot of precision making this I would imagine that probably a milling machine would be the best way to do it I'd imagine maybe you could scribe it on there and file it out but it would not be easy to be clear a bump key made by filing these to the the maximum depth stands no chance of working I'm saying that because I know of quite a few people who have tried that and folks you don't stand a chance so just stop doing it the next problem is that each of these locks has a zero left pin and that means one pin that if you lift it even a tiny little bit on this one its pin number three you have over said it and the lock will not open so you don't just need one bump key if you're gonna try to bump these because that's a zero lift pin is in a random position you need five separate bump keys one each with a missing bump in each of these five positions so you need to do some tool making if you want to stand any chance of bumping this the next problem is tension because this key doesn't immediately grab that little notch in the back of the keyway there's a little bit of play there that's gonna mess with your timing and then there's also the precision of this core such that you are really likely to bind something inadvertently so in short while bumping is theoretically possible you would need precision bump keys and a fair amount of luck I think my next idea was raking with a tool or a rake that is shaped not too dissimilar from this key to do that we would need a tension tool but frankly that is not that hard I made this one and used it quite a bit it worked well and if you look at it you can see that it is shaped very similar to this key and does allow enough position or I'm sorry enough movement that we can fit something small around that little hundred and eighty degree turn the real problem was dealing with the zero left pen and the fact that I only have a tiny tiny bit of front to back movement recall that after we have this inserted oops there's only a little bit probably about fifty this is actually exaggerated because it's disassembled now you have roughly 50 thousandths of an inch to go front to back with that tiny bit of room and those those zero left pens frankly I couldn't think of any obvious way to overcome those issues I then turned to electric snap guns that's a tool like this or like this and what they're designed to do is take these little needles and they impact the bottom of the pins several times per second and my idea was the chaos that this causes inside of the lock may just work to my advantage it's not too difficult to imagine a tool like this that makes a 180 degree turn much like this key does so that is what I did this is the last of three of these that I made I was adjusting the sizes as they broke during testing in fact I used it so much that the key stopped working in the middle of testing I actually had to replace the key pins however after say several hours of trying these and adjusting these tools I think it was the combination of the zero lift pin and the excellent tolerances that kept me out finally the method that I think may be able to reliably open these is impression but there are still a couple of obstacles here first these bold e key blanks will never work they're made of hardened 17:4 stainless steel so the soft brass pins that are inside of this will never mark one of these key blanks what you need to do is make your own key blank meta key plank made out of something soft like brass so that does require a little bit of expert machining or maybe you could even braise something like this together the other thing is file discipline now one swipe of a file normally when your impression is I'll say 10 to 15 thousandths of an inch for some people they've told me they're closer to 18 thousandths but still it's a pretty deep cut though it does correspond with the approximate cut of most major lock manufacturers on this Boley lock one cut that is the difference between let's say a number two cut or a three cut is only six thousandths of an inch that means if you take a full swipe at this with a file you could blow through two or three cuts in a single stroke so you need two completely revised how you file these keys if you are impression in it but that's probably next on my list I'll get some brass try to machine some of these blanks out and see if I can do that however my machining skills and my impression skills are not terribly good so that's probably going to be a while until we see that okay next let's talk about this hardware I'm going to cut the video and lay everything out so you can see what I've laid out are two different versions of the locking hardware that you can get with these Boley cylinders on the left is the ANSI grade three hardware and on the right is the grade - when boldi lock first introduced the cylinder it came with the great three hardware this is the lowest ANSI rating and it's intended for residential use now while it is the lowest rating you shouldn't automatically assume it's bad it still exceeds the quality of many of the locks that you'll find in your local home store even so Boley did get some complaints over the quality of these lock sets and there was also some discussions about it on online forums that were not very good so when Ryan Boley and I discussed that I would be making this video he asked that I mentioned that there is now an option for great - hardware which is rated for light commercial use and 150 thousand cycles it's only $15 more and frankly I think it's an appreciable improved if we compare any of these parts let's look at these dead bolts you can see this one is is physically heavier you can feel it easily we have the door plates that's gonna make it a little bit more secure and we also have a hardened anti sawing rod right in the middle of it so definite on the jam plates we have hardware that's relatively thin here certainly not nearly as thick as what you get on the grade 2 version then we go to the bezel this one is hollow and you can compare it to this one which is also made out of what I believe is steel on the outside but is filled up solid with a cast zinc or aluminum piece then on these thumb turns again you really just need to feel the weight this one is much heavier and actually this comes with an extra door plate that you don't get with the grade three hardware so a definite improvement and if I were buying one of these for my house I would definitely go with the grade 2 Hardware so well done - boldi lock for listening to the feedback and giving the buyers what they asked for frankly I wish more lock companies would do this because we would live in a more secure world ok last thing in what is becoming a really long video is bolli lock isn't resting on their laurels and they are soon coming out with an improved lock and Ryan sent me a few pictures that I could share with you now if you follow me on Twitter and you should be because you'll get lots of additional material on lock testing that never makes it to youtube if you follow me on twitter you already saw the new key a while ago and let's show it right now that's right this has two opposing rows of pins and it's being used in a massive closed shackle padlock the first padlock from boldi lock it's going to be available in three different materials aluminum brass and stainless and my understanding is that the final prototypes are done or very close to it I have some pictures that I can share with you on the design and I'm gonna end with them but keep watching this channel because this is where you're going to see it first probably within the next month so that's it for today if you do have any questions or comments about this 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 you

Channel: LockPickingLawyer

Views: 3,283,535

Rating: 4.9345908 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: qV8QKZNFxLw

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/hoffsta]

Very cool locks, however it seems like these are primarily made for lock geeks to play with. Who’s buying more of these, people scared of intruders or LPL YouTube subscribers?

[u/mastblast09]

I had to look at the submition date on the video because i remmber seeing another guy pick this same lock a while back ... yep 2018 checks out. insane the way this guy was able to do it for sure. HERE

EDIT: also please see below for the post from /u/MachineCodeMaster With another video of huxleypig69 getting in to the lock. Permalink below

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/d87rp6/lock_picking_lawyer_the_lock_brand_that_not_even/f1993w6/

[u/Aunvre]

Does anybody else think that this guy just sounds like the Emergency Medical Hologram from Voyager?

[u/PS_WAAAGGHHH]

Walk up to door with $200 unpick-able lock.

Walk over to window with $2 Ikea hammer.

Security is only as good as your weakest link; why the B&J ice cream episode is my favorite.

[u/MachineCodeMaster]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS0FSzamUzc

[u/DeepSpaceWhine]

At 3:35 he's picking up the pins with his tweezers and the noises gave me shivers, it's like I was at the dentist and he was scraping plaque off my teeth.

[u/iScreme]

Give me 10 minutes with those keys and I won't be able to open that lock at all. Probably take less than that for those keys to break in my pockets.

[u/BottledAnima]

This lock seems like a major pain in the ass if you were trying to get inside your house after a major night of drinking or really quickly in a panic.

[u/BillyBean11111]

in 1 year 100% of the comments to a LPL post will be:

"Don't you know locks are meant as a deterrent"