[640] Get the Most From Your Disc Detainer Pick

this is the lock-picking lawyer and today we're going to discuss something that a whole bunch of you have been asking me about this disc detainer pick now I own and use several of these tools but this is the one that you can purchase for about five dollars making it roughly ten times less expensive than the next cheapest one that I use and the prices go up pretty steeply from there so if you are just starting out picking disc detainer locks this is probably what you're using unfortunately it doesn't work out of the box so you really will need to modify it now I've seen a few videos that touch on this but they really only address how to prepare this tool for the cheapest of the cheap Chinese locks what I'm going to do is show you how I think you can get the very most out of the tool now the first thing you need to modify is the tip or the portion of this tool that directly manipulates the discs there are a couple different kinds of them there are flat and profile tips now a flat tip looks like this you can see it's a very very skinny and is roughly rectangular in shape this is much thicker and has a diamond shape you can see it's a little bit ugly but that is a diamond there and let me show you the reason why it needs to be that diamond shape what I have here is a disc detainer lock and what I'm going to do is rotate the first couple of discs at about a 45 degree angle to the other discs and if we look down the keyway you can see that makes a small diamond shape in there and that's what the inside of the lock looks like while you're picking so you need a tip that can navigate through that diamond so while our tip isn't going to end up being actually diamond shaped I still call it a diamond profile because that's what it needs to go through unfortunately that diamond profile will only take you so far if you look at this abus disc detainer kay you can see an example of pretty extreme bidding right here on what I believe is the number 4 desk and what that represents our two disks that are at about a 90 degree angle to each other so that's essentially if we were to rotate these disks a little bit more you can look down that key way and you can see that diamond profile tip will never fit through there the only thing that you can use to navigate a key way like that is a flat tip which can fit in between the disks now if you're feeling really ambitious you could put a flat tip on a tool like this take the old tip off and braze a new one on much like I did with this cobbled-together tool unfortunately that's not an easy thing to do to get this strong enough that I could use it I need to use brass braze which requires some pretty high temperatures and I also put an interference fit on that tip so it's probably something that most people are not able to do and probably if you're spending that much time you're gonna want to start on a better base than something like this so let's talk about what the average person can do using nothing but a file we're going to need to alter both the thickness and the profile of this tip now the thickness is pretty important because as this comes it's very thick and what I mean by that is from the tip to the top of the tip that's about two and a half to three millimeters and as that is right now you're going to be turning two to three disks at a time so what you're going to need to do is file that down to about one and a quarter millimeter so you can make it a little smaller than that but not much now at this point you may run into a problem and that's with respect to how these tips are attached if we look very carefully you can see a crimp mark right along here and that's how they're attached they simply shove them on a machine crimps them down and hopefully they'll stay in place however once the tool is this thin there isn't a lot of meat to that crimp and it's gonna start spinning on you I know it did for me so what you're going to have to do is get some flux and solder and attach that tip with something a little bit sturdier I used a low-temperature high-strength gunsmithing solder which is pretty much perfect for this application that I'd imagine probably any plumbing solder will work now let's talk about the profile and as it comes from the factory this diamond profile is way too large if we look at this kryptonite lock you can see it literally won't even fit in the keyway and you're gonna find that's the case with respect to a lot of disc detainer locks it comes from the factory about six and a half millimeters from end to end and about let's see what was that I think I measure that about two millimeters wide what we're gonna have to do is file this down to about five point seven five millimeters long and 1.75 millimeters wide and once you get it down to that thickness you're gonna find that it fits through there very very easily I also didn't feel it was necessary to keep a strictly diamond shape I rounded it out made it roughly like a football and I found that works pretty darn well okay now let's talk about the tensioning head or this portion right here which engages the first discs and allows you to tension the lock now in fact reform this tensioning head may work on some of the super cheap Chinese locks but once you step up from the bottom tier it's pretty much worthless for two reasons profile discs and spinners a spinner is a solid steel disc that's on top of the main disc stack they can spin a full 360 degrees you can find one right here you can see I can just spin this around and they come in varying thicknesses but I've seen them as thick as five millimeters thick now imagine the flats on this tip need to reach through a spinner sometimes it can be like I said as much as five mil meters thick and then engage a disc below it you simply don't have enough flat space here right now we only have about three millimeters I found it was necessary to file it down to about six and a half millimeters and it looks pretty rough I didn't do it all at once I filed more to the flats every time I found I needed it for a particular lock and that's probably what you'll end up doing you'll probably put about four or five millimeters on it and then slowly expand it as needed the next reason you're going to have to modify your tensioning head has to do with profile discs a lot of times those spinners have little bits of wording on them to make them match the profile of the key usually that's right in the center and on this kryptonite lock you can see we have exactly that little bits of wording on the center on either side now as this comes from the factory with these flats that will never fit through the spinner disk so what you need to do is file away the center section and again what I did was as I found that I needed more depth on filing that center section away I took it apart and filed it down a little bit more my concern was I didn't want to take away too much material and weaken the tool so I only take away the amount I need for the particular application okay a couple of final things that are optional but I think they're pretty darn helpful now when I pick this detainer locks I tend to use a lot of tension I know some others don't but I find it is is frankly much much faster and to help facilitate that what I've done is add screws that are slightly longer probably only about a half-inch longer but that little extra bit of leverage really makes it more comfortable second some people have found that their tools are really rough on the inside making spinning them pretty hard you can see that's not the case on this one I have not smooth that out at all this one's from the and again pretty smooth but what some people will do is take theirs apart and put this in a drill bit I'm sorry put this in a drill Chuck spin it up hit it with sandpaper get it ultra smooth frankly I don't find that necessary the only time I did find it necessary was on mine right up top I had some pretty gnarly bits of chroming that were actually catching on the locks so I did spin this up and take a little bit of material off so it's smoother finally I would consider either a lock tithing or soldering this shaft into the thumb turn and the reason why I think that's necessary I actually locked I did mine in was the shaft Ken slipped while picking under tension even if you have these little set screws nailed down pretty darn hard at a bare minimum I would carry around a tension or I'm sorry a hex wrench that can tighten these set screws down because I'll tell you once this starts slipping it can be really frustrating particularly if you don't have the tool you need to fix it so that's how I think you can get the most out of these tools since I do have this lock out we might as well see how the modified tool works I know you've seen me use it a few times on this channel before but there is one thing I want to note first thing I do when picking is rotate all the disks as far clockwise as they will go and then I'm going to counter rotate the spinner and the top disc just a little bit counterclockwise the reason I'm doing that is that now that I have these long flats the possibility of inserting the tensioning head too far becomes very real I can pick up two or three disks with this sometimes even more so by counter-rotating those first few disks I've created a small ledge there on to which this tensioning head will sit and it makes it impossible to insert it too far so let's get this in there okay we're tensioning off disc one so let's start looking for disc two got a little click there click out a three click out a four click out of five nothing on six or seven let's go back to the beginning to is pretty loose so is three I think four is binding got a click there five is loose six and seven are both loose not sure what's holding us up now there we go is number two so we went from having a tool that wouldn't even fit through the front door to a tool that can navigate and manipulate these locks pretty darn easily I hope this was helpful 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

Channel: LockPickingLawyer

Views: 148,609

Rating: 4.9596181 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: oiNNoHlA4Vc

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 18 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Nemo_Griff]

I like the sound of this one!

Edit: Great video! I love learning how to make the best of what you already have.

[u/[deleted]]

Any links for the picks for $5? I could afford to screw it up and start again!