Lockpicking intro

welcome to school house luck we are going to get up close and personal with the anatomy of a lock to give you a better sense of what you're actually doing when you pick a lock um just a caveat it is good to get get used to doing this by feel just because locks out in the wild don't look like this they're not clear that would defeat the purpose um so you may have seen animations or diagrams of what the inside of a lock looks like but maybe not necessarily what it actually looks like to scale so here we go so inside most pin tumbler locks which is pretty standard type of lock you have these sets of pins

this last one is not an actual pin it's just a retaining pin so you have two stacks on the top you have driver pins which are always all cut to the same size and then the bottom stack you can see the little lines there where they switch you have key pins those are all cut to different sizes and that's what makes keys those different jagged shapes and makes each one unique um and so what you're doing basically when you pick a lock is sort of replicating a key one by one pin at a time instead of all at once what you're trying to do is once all of the key pins uh once all the driver pins are

lifted above this line some people call that the shear line where you've got the plug separated from the actual housing body of the lock then once they're all above then that um lets a lock open and turn and then when a lock opens and turns unlatches this padlock so what you're basically doing is lining up all of these driver pins this is a very cheap lock so it opens very quickly so what that did is turned this so that it unlatches a little tooth here and the shackle is spring-loaded so it pops up and so pretty much most of the locks you're going to be picking as a beginner lock picker are this exact same

mechanism just with different amounts of pins and so what you're doing is basically lifting them up one at a time they're all spring-loaded but once you've actually set it in place while keeping really light tension on it it's going to feel really loose underneath because it's not the spring a little bit isn't springing back down anymore so that's why you keep tension on it hold them all into place until they're all set so this is what the inside of a lock looks like happy picking