Learn To Pick Locks And Avoid Beginner Mistakes

[Music] [Music] about a year and a half ago I taught myself how to pick locks I did it out of necessity I actually needed to get inside of a automatic coffee machine that was doing a shitty job of brewing the coffee the internal temperature was set to low for safety reasons and it was annoying to my coworkers since then I've taught about a dozen people to pick locks and lock kicking basics are actually very simple but I've noticed the same sorts of problems coming up over and over again and I also remember all the misconceptions that I had about picking locks before I started so I wanted to clear those things up first thing I wanted to clear up is what I would call the Hollywood lock pick you're trying to pick a lock and you just go in and out and in and out this is just a lack of basic knowledge and it's nothing to be ashamed of I had this misconception myself as a kid think about this if you take a key and you put it in a lock and you pull it in and out in and out in and out nothing happens and the reason why is because the lock is opened by applying torque to the cylinder so the first misconception I want to clear up is that there is no lock picking without being able to apply torque and most lock picking torque is achieved with something called a tension wrench now tension wrench sounds really magical but this is just a piece of strip deal from a windshield wiper now do you need to run out and get yourself a windshield wiper in order to become a lock picker absolutely not you can find metal tines from a street sweeper on the road you can go to a hobby shop where they sell pieces to make model airplanes and buy stuff like this or you can even grind a wrench shape out of a feeler gauge which is available at any automotive store in all seriousness the thickness of this is not critical the lane that just needs to be long enough for your finger to get over on it and it should be springy if you can help it but you can use non springy things as well in fact you can use a bobby pin for a tension Ridge the important thing about the tension wrench is that it applies that rotation to the cylinder you can see that cylinder rotating without that rotation you're never going to make this lock open you can see it here too on this practice lock that if I put the tension wrench here in the cylinder that I can get this little bit of rotation on the lock and that's the fundamental thing you need to start picking so the second thing I wanted to address was that when I had you know found all these lock picking guides online the famous MIT guide to lock picking which by the way it's not as good as the no-bullshit guide to lock picking I was very hung up about how perfect were these shapes like if I print them on my printer are they a little too small are they a little too big will they not work as though picks had some kind of sacred dimensionality that made them very special and in fact these three picks which are called standard hooks are pretty much all the same thing I mean they vary a little bit in their tip geometry they're made all three of these are made from slightly different materials but ultimately the size shaped length and angle of these things is not very critical essentially you need something with a little bit of a lift at end so that the shape is like that and the reason for that is because you're going to push up on the pins with it so the second misconception I want to clear up is that that there's anything really special about these tool shapes they don't need to be perfect they don't need to be exactly the right size you just need a little finger that you can put inside the lock and push on individual pins and depending on the lock you may have to change the tool to actually make these pins move so don't get too hung up on the exact size and shape of your picks and don't worry about buying expensive picks either in my experience for learning the very cheapest picks will do and in fact homemade stuff works just about as well I do think there's value in buying one pre-made set of picks if only just to get a feeling for the right size and shape I'm going to pick this practice lock to show something I often see from beginner Pickers when I'm teaching them they go in and they can they can feel the pins moving up and down like you can see these ones moving up and down and they think that the goal of picking is to jam all the pick all the pins all the way up so they'll go in and they'll work really hard to get all the pins stuck in the upward position and if they feel any down that they feel like they haven't gotten it yet but what you can see is if they take that approach some of the pins end up above the shear line I'm not going to address the shear line the cylinder the torque depends all those things are really well addressed in the videos of Bosnian build a lock-picking lawyer and a whole bunch of other people on YouTube which I'll link below the important thing to know is it's not about getting the pins all the way up in fact it's just about getting the pins to pop just above the shear line and to make a little click there was one I'm going to reset it I don't know if you heard that I'm going to try it again that was a pin being set right there you're just looking for a little quick when the pin pops over the shear line and that's it it's not about getting the pins all the way up it's about getting them to the right place just about anyone can pick one of these locks and I think that's a great thing also just about anyone can pick one of these locks and I think maybe that's less of a great thing but what you learn after going from this to something like this to maybe some this is a cheesy lock from Harbor Freight that actually is a plastic cylinder when you go through all these different kinds of locks what you learn is that each lock is a unique snowflake you don't know how to pick locks you actually learn how to pick individual locks first and then you learn how to generalize those techniques over lots of locks now I'd like to share the method that I've been using to teach all of my friends and co-workers when I had co-workers how to pick locks and it centers around this chinese-made practice law these practice locks are incredibly easy to pick and some people would say that that's that they're not a good place to start for that reason that you won't learn anything but what I found is that showing somebody that they can pick one of these maybe even on their first try is a great way to build a ton of confidence and to develop sense of feeling for the pins so that they get excited and move on to the next thing so step one in Vice Chiefs four-step plan to learn how to pick locks is by a practice lock and there are many styles and size of these I love these padlock ones I've given away half a dozen of these things they're great so I'm going to put the tension wrench in the cylinder see that I can rotate the cylinder just a little bit and I'm just going to lightly rest my finger here now how hard do you push I'm pushing just hard enough that if I pull my finger away there's a dent in my skin I'm not pushing real hard here this is pretty gentle just enough to feel this bind up and now I'm going to pick this this practice lock and that's it that's all there is to it I moved some of these pins up to the shear line and it popped open and now of course the next thing you want to do is do it again because it feels great the moment when that lock opens is this great confidence booster so I'm just going to go in and push on the pins and I might have a false set here but I'm just going to keep going okay if you can't get it on the second try just release let all those pins go back to their main position and then try it again I've got one more there it is now this is a very very easy lock but it's also very very satisfying you get a lot of feedback from it you can even look at what you're doing and you quickly get to a point where you can open this thing in seconds I haven't touched this one in years which is why that took me you know all of 20 seconds to open the next thing I recommend is getting a master lock master locks are known for being relatively easy to pick but they present a much bigger challenge than a lock like this I highly recommend starting with a brand new lock the reason being if your lock is old or gummy or filled up with sand or whatever that's sitting outside for 20 years it might be extremely difficult or impossible to pick and it's just going to frustrate you you're not going to learn from it the idea is to learn from it and to get better and better at developing the feeling of feeling the pins click and hearing the pins click ok so let's look at how easy it is to pick a master lock I just randomly picked one of these 3 tools these are all pretty good tools I'm going to go in and set the pins and there we go I think that was maybe ten seconds to set that master lock this is one of their highest security models obviously it's not very high secured against picking but you can see how you can quickly build confidence setting and resetting and learning a lock like this lock and there we go here it locked back into place the next thing that I do in my progression of lock picking is I moved on to better tools so I actually don't recommend that you start with homemade tools unless you have to buying a very basic set of picks it's really worthwhile and I like them that are fairly I like picks that are fairly thin but this is not a bad place to start if you have that practice lock you can see if we can if it can be done with these tools so there we go with some homemade tools but what I recommend is moving on to better and better or more and different tools so this is like a very inexpensive lockpick set that used to be on Amazon it's no longer the metal is very short its chromed it's kind of thick which means that it won't work for some locks this is one that I really love this is from my very first set and actually I sanded these surfaces to make them smoother and less gritty and then I put heat shrink tubing on it because after a while the metal handled was cutting into my fingers eventually I got these very nice locks from banggood or Aliexpress or something like that which have smooth handles with great feedback they're thin they're light and likewise with the tension wrench over time I've ended up with tons of different lock-picking tools and in truth I I use probably these this one this one this one and this little pile the most for my singleton picking but that's another step it's just to move on to better tools now there are different mindsets there's a community who are to teach these things online and they're fantastic they're called the lock sport community but they ridicule master locks and they're constantly moving further and further up the chain into higher and higher security locks it's kind of fantastic to watch I mean these people can pick a lock that's been engineered with all kinds of tricks but for the times in your life when you're likely to actually need lock picking like you lost the key to something that you own or your friend has something they bought at an auction and they want to get the lock off whatever the case you don't need to keep moving up and up and up into fancier and fancier locks and developing more and more and more outrageous skills the best thing that I can recommend to you is just to try a few different types of locks like try your practice lock try your master lock this lock is an interesting one to me because the cylinder is actually made of plastic this is a lock sold at Harbor Freight so it gives a very different feeling of feedback when you're when you're picking it in fact I find it rather challenging to pick the it's kind of kind of mushy for lack of a better word so just try out a bunch of different locks and then maybe try you know dirty locks try old used locks try house door locks try file cabinet locks you can try all these different kinds of locks rather than trying to pick an abus or an American or some other lock that's very very high-security train yourself on just a few different varieties of locks and that will make you a great lock picker [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Vice Chief

Views: 483,960

Rating: 4.7941389 out of 5

Keywords: locks lockpicking

Id: 6ayMqvu3-MY

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017