[643] Vintage French “Central” Lock Picked and Gutted

this is the lock-picking lawyer and what i have for you today is a really unusual vintage french lock this is called a central it came in two different variants a 5 pin and a 7 pin variant this is the 5 pin now the really cool part about this lock isn't necessarily the mechanism which is somewhat unusual for those of us in the u.s. more common in Europe but what's really cool about it is the key it has one of the most interesting looking keys I've ever seen we have a bow that's reminiscent of a handcuff key and extending from that is a steel rod from which six fins extend now the fin at the 12 o'clock position is the tensioning fin and then each of the others has a different length and those are the bidding fins so to use this all we would do is insert the key into the lock turn it and of course the bolt moves now while this looks really interesting and unusual what we find in here is actually just a really strange tubular lock we can look right down the keyway and I think you can see five pins let me actually put some light in there for you you can see we have five pins so picking this is just like a tubular lock except we have less pins to deal with so it shouldn't be too hard the only complication is that we do have to turn the key a full 360 degrees to remove the bolt from this little housing that it goes into so we're actually going to have to pick this six times luckily for us it's easy enough to pick that picking it six times really isn't that much of a chore now as for the format of this lock this is a relatively common lock format in Europe though we rarely see it in the US what we have here is the lock cylinder which goes through a hole that you drill on the door then on the far side we have the thumb turn and to use it what you do is press down on the thumb turn that disengages the locking mechanism from the lock cylinder and once we do that you turn it and it opens up pretty simple okay so let's see what we can do to pick into this interestingly the Pulford treatise on this Locke says that they're pretty hard to tension and that's not what I found at all I just took a normal little tension wrench like this Bennett back at about 90 degrees and we have the perfect tension tool for this you just insert this into the the place where the tensioning fin would go and we are ready to start picking so the first time we pick this we have to pick all five pins and each subsequent time we pick it we're only going to have to pick four there's one and I don't know if you noticed that bolt moved just a little bit let's keep going there we go a little bit more it moved a little bit more as you can see picking this once is not very difficult the only reason this lock has any pic resistance at all is because you do have to pick it so many times a guy over set one of those there we go I think that was the fourth time we picked it so we should just have two more there we go the full 360 degrees I didn't time that but we got through that pretty darn quickly okay let's take this apart and I will show you what's inside of this I can start by removing this lock housing and that should just be these four screws let's loosen them up and then I'll just twirl them out pretty quickly [Applause] okay we should be able to take this back plate out now it's sticking just a little bit so let me give it a little encouragement hmm there we go okay there's the spring that pushes the thumb turn outward here we have the back of the locking mechanism and if we take a look at the way this locking mechanism works you can see it's a pretty nice solid steel bolt that goes all the way across and we just have a little I don't even know what to call it I guess that's a gear mechanism that turns it okay let's put that aside and concentrate on getting this lock cylinder out I've got three more screws here and two more screws now it's the neverending Russian doll of screws hopefully this is the end of it and I can feel a lot of spring tension here there we go so all five screw or all five Springs from behind the 5 pin chambers are here let's let's start by taking those Springs out and I am going to put them I'll call it one two three four five these are all very long and actually very powerful Springs let's try to dump out the pins from slot one and I think I got a little bit more than that I'm not sure where that other one came from but I guess we'll find out soon enough that's obviously a driver pin we have really long key pins here there we go okay nothing particularly unusual about these pins except for their sheer size they're very thick and of course very long now to get the rest of this mechanism apart I think we need to remove this screw for a lock that has the age of this I'm assuming this is from the late 60s or early 70s it's actually in remarkably good shape okay so here we have the front of the lock and this is where we would insert the key you can see how each of those fins would engage the bidding surfaces of the pins and what we're trying to do is line up the shear line in between this ring and this ring so back here is where all our driver pins and springs would sit while the lock is is in the open position okay let me give you a close-up of all of this okay as you can see all of these key pins and and actually driver pins all appear to be standard there might be a serration on driver pin number two I'm not sure about that or maybe that's just a line that appeared with age but the remarkable thing about these is the size they're all very very large pins and the springs are quite large as well if we move up here you can see the front of the lock this is made out of steel I'm assuming to provide some drill resistance and we have the back of it I guess what we would normally call the lock body where all of the springs and driver pins would rest when the locks in the open position nothing particularly unusual on the inside of this housing but the real show with this is one of the coolest looking keys I've ever seen so that's all I have for you 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: 602,725

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Id: pZGuILQWQ3E

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018