Making an unpickable lock. Calling locksmiths

no i'm not locked out i just want to see if you could break into my house the deadbolt doesn't really have a brand it's a stuffed brand deadbolt which i'm pretty sure you've never seen one of these before i guess i should explain what's going on here i designed and built what i think is an unpickable lock although for some reason my wife doesn't share my unfounded confidence you really want to convince people you should have an expert try it you don't think i'm an expert no i do i just made a real expert she's totally calling me out and as an easily manipulated man i just can't let that stand so i found a locksmith and challenged them to break into my house i spent so much time on this lock and i just need it to work this was one of those unexpectedly difficult projects i had to design some parts more than 10 times until i could get them reliable enough to have a locksmith go at it we're going to have to do some real work here to unpack this lock because you need to understand how locks are picked and to understand how locks are picked you need to understand how locks work so let's get into it imagine that i have a bar that i can slide in and out of a slot this could be a deadbolt for a house or whatever if i put a pin through both pieces this bar is now locked i can't move it this is about the simplest possible lock and this is a very insecure lock because all that i have to do is push this up and then this green part it's unlocked if i split the pin into two pieces i have to push on it the exact right amount so that this lines up with this if i push it too far then the lower piece jam's locked if i don't push it enough the upper piece jam's locked and then a key for this lock is just something with a little wedge that will push these up the correct amount so that it can slide past let's take that drawing into the third dimension sort of here's how you unlock it with the key i also made a lock pick so i also made a lock pick all i have to do is slowly lift the pin upwards as i pull on the locked part and it will just pop open when the pin is in the right spot you can now pick single pin two-dimensional locks lock designers realize that one pin isn't quite enough so what they said is well if you like one pin so much how about five i'm using my glowforge laser cutter to make these locks it's awesome for quick prototyping lifting five pins simultaneously to the correct height is easy for a key but if you think about it picking a lock with five pins should be almost totally impossible imagine that i have a five letter password that i need to guess the number of combinations of letters is really high in fact if you do the math it's about 12 million combinations you have the same problem trying to guess the position of the pins in a lock what it really comes down to is that just like us locks live in the real world and that means despite what they show in magazines they have imperfections if we zoom in on the pins inside of a lock nothing fits perfectly and there's roughness and all kinds of issues this creates a lot of ways for a pin to get stuck in the unlocked position i could pull sideways on the lower part of this lock then push up on the pins and get the red pin stuck on this little edge if i can find a way to do this for every pin in the lock then that's it it's unlocked this is equivalent to guessing a password one letter at a time for each letter you have a maximum of 26 options at most it'll take 130 guesses instead of 12 million that is the essence of lock picking break the problem down into a series of tractable small problems the main difference between common locks and the one that i've made here is that they typically rotate a cylinder rather than sliding lock designers have come up with all kinds of tricks to make locks harder to pick some locks are so good they're almost impossible but in the end someone usually finds a way to set pins individually and pick the lock the key idea behind my lock is that it eliminates the ability to pick one pin at a time you have to try all the combinations which makes picking it intractable here's my conceptual idea for how to do that you start with a normal lock with a normal key that sets all the pins to the correct height except this lock is somehow designed such that you cannot test if the pins are at the correct height until you do a few things first you somehow lock the pins in place so they can't drop if the key loses contact with them then you separate the key from the pins which stay in place because they've been locked and then this is very hand wavy but you insert some kind of barrier between the key and the pins then you test the pins to see if they're set correctly this strategy leaves no possible way to test only one pin at once or to change your guess once the pins are being tested you will be subject to all the possible combinations good luck have fun conceptually this lock is really quite simple but designing a mechanism that i can actually make it's a whole other story how do i lock the pins in place how do i fit it in a normal sized deadbolt how do i make it resettable catch on all the pins so after protracted wailing and gnashing of teeth here's the design that i finally came up with as a point of reference this is taking me about three times as long as moving basketball hoop there's a whole lot going on in here so let's take one piece at a time at the center of the lock is this core that accepts the key and already we have a part that's essentially impossible to manufacture just look at the way that it cuts left and right folks he's certainly in a tight spot let's see how he handles this one mr stuff breaking it up into manual pieces you cannot make this stuff up i would love to know where he pulled that tool from looks like the perfect tool for the job and it sounds like the crowd agrees this whole new addition to the mill is a tormach microarc contrary to the name implies it doesn't hold two of every little animal it allows me to spin apart while i'm machining it and i could not have made the parts for this lock without this thing it's awesome it uses a harmonic gearbox which is like basically science fiction technology i'm gonna resist digging into it for now but maybe someday cause it's really cool and here's where i reveal how my magic trick really works it mostly comes down to this very complicated and hard to make part that holds the core and some very special pins putting the key in pushes these little pins up if i take another pin and put it on top of the pin being pushed up i can find a way to freeze this pin at whatever height the lower pin pushed it to and then i can swing it sideways once it loses contact with the pin that pushed it up there's no way for the key or a person trying to pick the lock to change its height then you can try to pass it through a gate that it only goes through if it's at the right height so when you put it all together all of the pins have to be set correctly and there's no way to individually pick each pin it kind of looks like a little pig doesn't it i've hand waved away this mechanism that locks the pins in place but i think you're old enough for the truth now this mechanism is the worst so there's this bar right here that we push with the key if we look at this from the top you might think i could do something like this where i just push a little lock bar over which will hit each key right here and lock them in place but this doesn't work if things aren't the exact perfect size it'll hit one pin before it hits another and it'll never touch it so this will not get locked what i've been attempting to make is a system where each little finger that can lock a pin is floating on a spring that way each one can individually compress different amounts i can guarantee that they all make contact this has been hard for a lot of reasons related to actuating it with a key keeping things from binding up dealing with grease and other things that change friction i have made so many of these in different designs both with flexural springs with real springs with all different kinds of ramp geometries and it has been a huge pain at this point i still don't have it working reliably but i'm going to finish the rest of the lock so i can test the whole system how would you like a cot 35 000th of the top please do anything fun this weekend i hung out with my son he's a real chip off the old block oh wow cool getting it shrouded and mounted on door was actually surprisingly tricky because i have moving parts everywhere that that want to interfere with the mount so now it looks nice but it still doesn't work so it's 5 am and no i didn't get up early remember how i talked about remaking parts over and over again i did that for three more days i finally ran out of ways to do it wrong and i cracked it it's the first time i've ever tried it in the deadbolt it's the smallest thing but you would not believe how great it feels to see that deadbolt go in it unlocked there's just a little mechanism inside this that does exactly what it's designed to do i just love it i did try to pick it to make sure i wasn't missing something totally obvious and as i expected i couldn't do anything i've put off calling a locksmith as absolutely long as i can but it's time for me to look fate in the face and see how they judge me i found a locksmith that specializes in picking locks and the first thing that they tried to do was to set the pins individually using a variety of different tools it turns out they weren't able to set more than one pin at once thanks to the pin locking mechanism so unexpected bonus security feature so with this first approach that they were using they weren't close to picking the lock at all they also tried a technique called bumping and this is what i was most afraid of it launches the pins upwards and very hard and fast by hammering a special key into the lock and i was afraid they'd be able to launch the pins and quickly rotate the cylinder and get them to land in the right spots and go through the gates but they couldn't i don't think it would work they gave it a solid effort and tried for quite a while eventually there's just nothing else to try yeah we tried yeah thank you for trying and i'm not sure why i was so stressed about something that doesn't matter but i really was so it's definitely resistant to the standard attacks yeah standard proof that bump key it's just like watching them hit my child with a with a hammer really that's your baby i spent all this time raising my kid i don't want to see them fail when it matters the most you know what i mean i don't even know what to say to that i wouldn't say it's unpickable i don't think there's enough evidence to say that i think that is a strong lock i think that it is formidable you know who you should send it to the lock-picking lawyer i would love to send it to the lockpicking lawyer let us know if you'd like to hopefully we can make it happen if you want us to send it to the location lawyer don't bark i would definitely make some upgrades for sending tim more pins more power you know all that stuff one other thing that i wanted to point out is that this thing is not going to be important it's not going to be commercially viable the main value is just the educational aspects the mechanical complexity just far outweighs any benefit if you want a truly unpickable lock just get a lock that doesn't have a key there's tons so did you like my wife tracking trebuchet i appreciate the learning experience what did you learn i learned nothing but hopefully our daughter learned something i built a robot to track and fire upon my wife as if she was a medieval target thanks to this video's sponsor kiwiko i love kiwico they provide a service that i think is really important i've mentioned before that so much that i know how to do i learned outside of school my parents gave me all kinds of building and project kits this is one of the first complete models i did with no help doing these projects taught me so many skills and it formed a solid foundation that i built so many of my other skills on top of kiwico is awesome because every month they send you a crate with everything that you need to do a complete project start to finish i've built and modified a number of these in their awesome projects there's the main project but then there's an entire magazine that goes into all the concepts behind the thing that you built and then there's other projects that you can build with the pieces that came with the kit i added a few off-the-shelf components to this and turned it into a wife tracking trebuchet hey wife come check this out we're learning what learning this stormy castle just remember it's never too early to teach your children about medieval siege strategies it's not all trebuchets they have eight different lines for different age groups and interests i was really excited when i saw they have a line of crates that's just a little bit more suitable for my daughter's age so whether it's for a child a relative yourself honestly this is really fun to build give the gift of knowledge and skill it's a long-term investment that you're not going to regret can you imagine the skill that you would build from doing these crates every month for a year or two i am so thankful to have been exposed to these kinds of kits growing up if you go to kiwico.com stuff made here you'll get 50 off your first crate and you'll also be supporting this channel although i'm not planning on selling any stuffed brand locks you can still support this channel by subscribing if you think i earned it checking out my patreon where you can support these projects directly and get a behind-the-scenes view as well as taking a minute to check out any sponsors it helps me a lot and is much appreciated [Music] you

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 9,507,255

Rating: 4.9451022 out of 5

Keywords: lock pick, lock, unpickable lock, stuff made here, mechanical design

Id: _7vPNcnYWQ4

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/lvlobius1]

Im sure we will see this as a thumbnail on a sub-2min LPL video shortly.

[u/MaximumSpecialty]

I got this drill-pick in my truck. Be right back.

If that doesn't work I got a sledge-pick we can try.

[u/shmehh123]

This guy is smart as fuck after watching his videos. Damn.

[u/mysquirrelbrain]

And in an interesting collaborative twist Smarter Every Day has loaned LockPickingLawyer his Supersonic baseball cannon.

[u/tyler1118]

The upcoming LPL video on this lock is gonna be special.

[u/NolanSyKinsley]

I already have an idea of how to pick it, it will be interesting if LPL gets his hands on it and does the same.

[u/allhands]

/u/lockpickinglawyer you should take a crack at this one!

[u/Dejouxx]

Stuff Made Here!! What a phenomenal YouTube channel!!

[u/cyy8883]

I can't wait to see what LPL will try with this