Yes, the red arm I see over there. And now see how you feel. Most of the esoteric pick designs in the huge, overpriced sets you see on the web and from locksmith suppliers are useless, and eventually end up being discarded in favor of the basic hooks. Several positions are possible; here a vertically-oriented torque tool is used at the top of the keyway. Most commercial torque tools are designed for horizontal orientation. Try each of your torque tools in the lock. When you`ve mastered the SX locks, try the "Schlage SC" keyway locks. Schlage Primus locks also use a sidebar. The sidebar must engage these grooves in order to retract and allow plug rotation. The lock will never pick open in this state; you must release torque and start over. The tool must have a good fit to be effective, however. There will be a slight "backward" pressure on the torque tool. An oscillating motion with the torque is often helpful here. Using the five or six pin lock, find a pick that lets you locate and lift each pin across its full range of motion without disturbing adjacent pins too much.



































In particular, you should feel when you set a pin as much in the torque tool as you do in the pick. As the peaks hit the pin stacks, energy is transferred from the bottom pins to the top pins, much like the action of the cue ball in billiards. Learn what a pin in that state feels like. There is some inferior music that means something; what we call program music, like the Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture, or some of Debussy’s perpetrations such as the Engloutie Cathedral, where it’s creating visual pictures or imitating natural noises: the beat of horse’s hooves or rollings of military drums and the sound of the waves, et cetera. That means being able to reliably pick the lock, both clockwise and counterclockwise, and being confident that you know how you opened it. And when it says, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image," it doesn’t mean merely images of wood and stone (which nobody took seriously anyway), it means above all images made of imagination: images made of concepts. The opening of the Gospel of St. John: "In the beginning was the Word." It doesn’t mean in the beginning was chatter. While this might have gotten the lock open, you just as easily might have pushed the cut past the shear line entirely, preventing the lock from opening altogether.



































When you feel confident visualizing and using picks to maneuver around the pins in the AR1 and SX keyways, you`re ready to start actually opening locks. The keyways include Arrow ("AR1"), Ilco-Schlage-multiplex ("SX"), Schlage-C ("SC"), and Yale-8 ("Y1"). The Peterson picks are more sturdy, at the expense of being bulkier (but they still fit easily in many of the keyways you`ll be picking). Intuitively visualizing the inside of a lock takes a bit of practice, but will pay off as you start picking locks in earnest. The other should give you a bit of resistance. For this exercise, you`ll be using the two pin AR1 lock. Again, continue with the AR1 locks. Now release torque and try again, but this time lift the pins as little as you can when you test them, while still distinguishing between the two states. While a fairly wide range of torque will sometimes pick these locks, try find the lightest torque that works. Finally, for a real challenge, try the Yale "Y1" keyway locks. As a general rule, locks mounted on the left side of a door open clockwise, while locks on the right side of a door open counterclockwise. Each pins has a groove cut in its side at the position corresponding to its correct rotation.



































You can’t live on the right side of the tracks without there being a wrong side of the tracks. It`s binding because it`s the one most out of alignment in the direction you`re turning, what is billiards and so its top pin is being pinched (gently) between the plug and the shell. Learn to pick this lock one pin at a time. You should always know which pin you`re working on at any given time. The following is a series of self-paced exercises to help you master the basic techniques of pin tumbler lock picking. Understanding the theory of lock picking is only a small part of being able to successfully pick locks. It remains in wide use in certain applications, especially safe deposit locks, safes, small cabinet locks, and mailbox locks. You may find one of the smaller LAB hook picks to be easier here than the larger Peterson picks, although you can usually still pick this keyway with the small Peterson hook. The pin is not picked but is not the currently most misaligned one. While pins are usually set by raising the cut from the plug to the shear line, they can also be picked by first oversetting the cut to within the shell and then lowering it to the shear line.