ERA Picking Guide

hi guys um thank you for attending the training last week um I'm not entirely sure we covered the um Fortress uh in sufficient detail for you to be able to go away and comfortably open them and and time didn't really allow us to cover everything that I wanted to but um what I'm going to show you is on the Fortress if we put the pick in and turn it in the Locking Direction until it stops now if you take your standard wire that you use for opening say for example this lock here the bolts on the left so we have this uh left hand picking wire but if we pop it into the pick on the uh on that side of the flute not the top of it but the bottom of it um I'm making a bit of a picture of this let's try again so put the flute that's it put that in there and then you can probably see the wire is I wonder if I can zoom in there we go you can see that the wire is actually underneath there and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to hang this pick handle vertically downwards um and then if we take the uh the pick wire um go ahead in you go there we go now as you probably discovered in nearly all the train and I kept talking about the orientation of the uh of this lollipop if you like the puck or whatever now I've got three moving backs and forwards what I'm going to do is I'm going to push that to the very back so we're up so we're on lever five and I'm going to turn this until it hits the belly of the lever which is there and if you look at the angle of that you can see that the this angle here is showing me about just over 45 degrees and then if I pull it Forward onto lever four and you can see that I can't actually put it Forward I need to rotate it which means that the next lever is actually the belly of the lever is lower so if we go there just pull it forward a bit and it's a little bit of a balance next there we go that's the belly of the next lever as you can see that's more like 40 degrees and if I come forward one more now uh come forward another lever please um because of this ABA pattern basically that is going to be the same as the previous lever that was in there before so so we've got this angle which is over 45 degrees we've got an angle that's under then we've got another another one that's going to be the same as lever five I appreciate this is not in focus by the way let me just do that and see there we go that's in Focus um okay so so basically we've got quite an upright angle followed by not quite so upright and then an upright angle so let's go to um let's go all the way to level one and have a look and you can see that's quite upright as well I'm not pushing this hard if I push it hard then I can influence it all I'm doing is just bringing it up until it just rests against the belly of the lever okay so so there as you can see it's gonna be there somewhere so we've got this roughly the same angle as we've got at the back and then if I try and push that onto lever too it's being obstructed so that if I turn it and so I can get on to leave it too which is there you can see that's quite a shallow angle altogether so one of these angles telling me about the back of the levers on this Fortress but what they're telling me and what you can establish yourself is that if we go all the way back to lever five again and have a look there um when you're at this sort of angle uh just over 45 degrees it's you're getting towards a high lift lever uh but not quite high lift so this is going to be like a um remember this there are seven levers in this in this lock lever seven is down here which is like the lowest lift and lever one is about there which is the highest lift so if that's level one that's leave it to this is lever three and that's quite uh that's quite important because um only levers one and two in the Fortress have anti-pick notches and and those anti-pick notches come before the true gate so when you lift the lever up first thing it will do is it will engage into anti-pick and then you lift it out and it'll go all the way up to uh to the true gate but that's only going to leave us one and two so where the angle is like that or like that that's levers one and two um and then leave levers three four five six and seven all have the anti-pick um after the true game which means if you were to lift it to there and then lift it slightly higher what you're going to do is you're going to take it out of the um true Gates and put it into anti-pick above and this is where good tension control on these locks is really important because if the lever's binding and you're lifting it and you're holding a great big handful of uh of uh attention it'll suddenly release and it'll jump up and it'll go into its anti-pick so you need to be able to feather the tension um and it's a skill set that comes with picking fortresses you need to be able to feel the resistance and then just feather this tension backwards on that on the handle so that lever starts to move freely or you're not actually pushing a huge amount of rotational force on here because you put lots of rotational force in there then what's going to happen is the the lever is going to jump and when it jumps we end up with undesirable an uncontrollable results so whenever I come across one of these out out in the field first thing I do is I'll put the pick in as I've shown there put the wiring in the bottom uh go to lever5 have a look at the angle leave a fork pull try and pull it this way if you pull it this way and it moves freely uh and maybe even jumps to further further angle then you know that you've got a high lift and then an even higher lift in this case we've got that followed by that followed by that because that's ABA followed by that followed by that so this log Loosely translates to three probably five three I would say that's potentially a six and then finally at the end there we go back to a three again so if I was a betting man I would say this lock um doesn't have any high lift levers judging by the angle of this puck um and if it did have highly flavors we we would have seen a completely different result from this so what I'm going to do let's just uh let's just turn the curtain all the way around let's pop the picking to there okay right let me just rotate this round so I can actually get to the pick and I'll just set the uh Focus there we go so what we know of this lock now is that we've got um a high lift a low lift a high lift a low lift and a high lift effectively that's what I'm expecting and I'm what I'm also expecting is that none of these levers are going to go into anti-pick unless I lift them too high so now the one of the things that we discussed on Wednesday was that when you're picking a fortress always pick the back three levers first and um what will happen is when you've picked the back three liters successfully you will get a little jump on the bolt probably no more than that and that little jump on the bolt then tells you that you have successfully set um the back three levers and then you've got the two at the front to deal with after that um so be very mindful of where this is when you're picking so what I'm going to do is I'm going to see whether we can actually um record this jumping um I'm not sure how I'm going to do that actually there's no way there's no reference visual reference for us to use but but when it jumps back I'll hold them I'll tell you in fact uh let's see if I can find some I thought I had some tape on my on my uh desk my desk is an absolute ship tip oh here it is got it okay so um what I'm going to do is I'm just going to pop this bit of tape just there and what you'll notice with that bit of tape is there's a slight Gap at the bottom there and then when the when it jumps we're going to do a comparison and see uh and see how far it jumps in okay so so I'm going to apply a a light tension on this and first thing you're going to do always good practice check you've got the clear run of the pack you can hear that the pick is actually hitting the bottom of the lever bellies but uh but I do have a reasonably clear access there backwards and forwards um so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just test the the undersides of these levers so there's lever five and as you can see lever five it's just not binding there's nothing there it's going to leave a four which we know is a lower lift and okay lever four is binding so I'm going to shut up now and if you just see if you can hear there's a little click then it's still heavily bound there okay so so that has just set and actually the bolt moved back a little bit already so let's go to let's go to five sounds like it's already set I don't know how for if you look at how I'm doing this just fingertip you can hear it tapping let's go to three okay three is heavily bound so so now I know this is a high lift and not too high and what I'm going to do is is it's heavily bound so I'm going to relax this hand and allow it to start to move now it's moving now the lever's going up and I'm expecting this lever now to set and the bolt to jump back there okay so it's set now if you look at the the gap on the bottom of that tape now it's gone so the Gap where it was before so this bolt has actually jumped back in and I felt this handle rotate around that is really typical of the era Fortress when you're picking it so as you saw I think great do big movements I've done very gentle movements and I've only picked The Binding levers but if we have now that's jumped if we now um test the levers so so just a little relaxation there to leave a five is tapping the before is tapping and lever three is tapping so they're all tapping because the those three levers are in their true Gates as evidenced by the uh bolt jumping back so what we're going to do now is look to see whether lever two or one up is bound now let's try two which is a low lift okay so this is really bound up so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to very gently move that again I'm going to be quiet again so it's going up very slowly I'm relaxing my hand when the bolt jumps back by the way it gives you a little bit of leeway on the tension you don't need to hold it quite so hard okay have a listen to that you can now hear that lever two is tapping and I've hardly moved the uh the pucker tool so the angle on the puck so there's five four so high lift low lift higher lift low lift so in theory this should just leave me now leave a one to get the lock open which we know is a high lift from the decode so let's uh let's just lift that up okay so it's going up come on up you go so let's just check what we're doing five four three two and level one it's been a pain to get underneath it okay there we go so we've got underneath level one and we've got the lock open and uh and that is basically how the vast majority of uh Fortress locks will pick so so just to recap you can do a visual decode on it so you know as a minimum you know what you're dealing with highs and lows um and then you can um once you know that you can then start picking it with confidence uh that you're roughly you know roughly where The anti-pick Notches are set those back three levers and you get that little jump on the bolts and then that only leaves you two other leaves at the front for you to uh to worry about um and if you've really worked out whether they're low or high lift uh then you can you can pick those out as you saw and get the lock open in in a single run now I didn't have to go backwards and forwards over it a lot the only reason I went backwards and four was over that was just to check that the levers are already putting Gates uh had stayed there so um that's Fortress uh recap basically and um all of the techniques that we learned on Wednesday were implemented there so a good tension control not holding it too heavy not holding it too light reading the feedback on the levers and knowing before we even started knowing what we were dealing with inside this lock it all helps it all conspires to uh to give you a good picture so let's um let's do one more very quickly let's take take this lock out now what I'm going to do this time is I'm going to put uh where are we okay here's another Fortress um and so let's do a quick decode on this so turn the curtain in the Locking Direction pop your wiring underneath the the central flutes and if we hold it there like that there's Me Knocking the camera apologies right what I'm going to do now is just change the focus so we can see what's going on the park all the way back to lever five turn the puck and there look at that can you see that angle that's that's gone beyond 45 degrees that's quite uh that's quite um that could potentially be a high lift lever as in the two as opposed to where it was there just now which was uh which was the three so we'll call that a two we'll put we'll pull this towards us on to leave before and you can see that it won't pass so I'm going to twist it there's lever four so there's the angle of lever four it's 45 degrees so that's possibly going to be a five so we've got a two a five next leave it should be a two again which is there so you can see we've got that sharp angle um and let's come to the front of the lock oh wow look at that okay so we've got a really a really upright in fact that's probably more two than the ones at the back let's just keep that in mind let's go to the back and have a look at the back Cleaver is there front lever as well okay so so it could be it's going to be something like uh a two five two one two yeah so Services slightly different so so okay well maybe um there so I'm going to say that the two front levers are high lift and all the back levers are low-lived in other words the levers on the back true gate Falls um before the antipic Notch and then the two levers at the front need to be lifted beyond the anti-pick notch so let's give that a go and obviously with experience and time you'll you'll be able to work this out for yourself um by knowing what you've got inside the uh inside the lock so let's pop the wire into the correct side for picking and I won't put the tape on but I'm expecting it to jump again so uh so let's have a little let's lift um lever five is a is a relative so I've got full access to the pack leaving five is a relatively high lift so and it's binding there it's released it's hard to say there we go so um I'm going to memorize the angle of that puck because that's the same angle that I need to operate uh lever three with the ABA pattern let's do lever three now lever 3 was heavily bound let's lift it up okay let me try that a little bit more yeah I think I've overlifted lever five there so so we look at where the lever starts which is there if we look at where the lever finishes when it's lifted which is there so that's maximum lift and that's minimum lift so so if it's a low lift with with the anti-pick notch afterwards then we don't need to lift that anywhere near as high as I did just now so there's where it is lifted too uh let's go to lever three there so those two are the same let's go to level four there's four in its Gates fives in its Gates three is in his case okay let's see whether the front levers are bound I haven't felt a jump on the on the bolt and as you can see lever one is loose and leave it two is neither two of the one that's bound lever two is bound so let's lift that up because that's all the way up lever one so basically because these front two levers aren't binding I know that something is not quite right at the back here so let's try the back again just do a reset try again so there's those five there's three okay that's definitely three setting look at that angle there and we need to mirror that with five which is there and then we'll pick four so yeah we're doing all right with that I think five still haven't had that jump patience is the name of the game here that's just released so it's bound up to a point and then it's released I would expect this to have um I would have I would expect this to actually jump back a bit so let's just try again I think that's gone too far let's try again okay so there's one foreign just being a little sticky with uh with being in the right position but I've just managed to nudge them in with a bit of gentle tension and working them backwards and forwards and now we're probably just stuck on these front two levers so let's lift uh lever one up it's nice and bound it's going to go up to an anti-pick Notch and then it's going to go above which is what it's just done let's go to lever two anti-pick Notch and above okay and we're open so yeah so that took a little bit of a while there but um but as you can see I worked through the problems I knew that the um the levers by the angle of the puck were potentially overlifting a little bit and going into the anti-pick notch on the back um but once we worked that out I could then go back and pick them over and over again and and get that little jump on the bolt which uh which was missing and once that jump was there we then knew that we could work on the two levers at the front which were in fact the same and they're both a high lift in other words the answer pit Notch was a before the true gate so okay well that's uh 25 minutes of a little bit more about the Fortress and um there's plenty more about this lock there is a it's a good lock to master and then of course then once this is mastered then the the next block really is the um uh the um strong bolt version of this which which picks slightly differently you don't get this jump in quite the same way as you do with the uh with the Fortress but the theory is exactly the same and the way that you lift the levers and the way that you decode the levers is exact is exactly the same as well okay guys thanks a lot and uh yeah I hope you enjoy this video cheers uh please do give me some feedback by the way um it'd be much appreciated okay thanks a lot bye for now

Channel: LockLab101

Views: 372

Keywords: CyberLink, PowerDirector21

Id: lPWp27q-WX8

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023