LockSmithing
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This is not a freebie so much as it lets you get free...
Contents |
Alarm
Beware even if you can get past the lock there may be an alarm.
Car Door Locks
Older cars can be unlocked with a metal yard stick that has a 1/2 inch notch cut into it, start hooking near where the door key box appears to be.
Cylinder Key Locks
A soft plastic pen barrel or cardboard shaped to a tube can be inserted and wiggled while a gentle twisting is applied eventually the lock will turn. Many machines using unscrew-the-lock type cylinder locks need to be unlocked for every turn.
Warded Locks
These are the old fashioned looking locks that have the keyhole shape which can usually be opened with a piece of stiff wire.
Lock Bumping
A very effective and easy way to open almost any lock. Have a key fitting the lock cut to maximum depth on all cylinders leaving shallow elevations between, the tip and shoulder are filed back 1mm, your bump key is ready. If tapped with a screwdriver handle, while applying a gentle turning pressure in the direction of opening, will bounce the pins separating them and allowing the lock to turn after a few tries. see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_bumping
Traditional Tension and Pick
The traditional method of lock picking is slow and requires quite a bit of skill. There is no magic Magnum PI ten second unlocks except for a few competitive sport unlockers. The technique involves applying tension in the opening direction of the lock with a flat torque wrench which can be made from a hairpin or bought in a picking kit, a pick or rake is introduced and an attempt is made to align all of the pins in their sticking spots in the mechanism where they are held by the tension from your wrench.
Door Jack
If you can use a jack of some sort to bow out the door frame even deadbolts might be defeated in seconds, put plywood squares at the contact points to prevent scarring the door frame.
Combination Locks
Used on safes and padlocks they can be opened by listening to the clicks of the mechanism, beating the combo out of its owner, or dynamiting the safe. The safecracker listening to the clicks is often offended by the sound of detonating dynamite next to his head.
Cheap padlocks can sometimes be shimmed with some beverage can material down the hole that it closes into. It is also often easy to break cheap locks by holding on tightly and jerking it hard a few times until it opens, assuming you have no bolt cutters.
Another effective method is to buy a cheap bendy saw (.99cents at some stores) and simply saw throught the narrowest metal part of the lock, works on padlocks and some bike locks too, and only takes about a minute.
Copy a Key
Plaster Mold
OSS officers in WW-II sometimes carried a key kit containing plaster of paris and talcum powder that they would take an impression of a key on both sides, the talcum powder would keep the two plaster sides from sticking as the impression was taken. A special low melting point alloy would be melted with a candle and poured into the mold making hopefully a perfect if flimsy copy key. One possible alloy is Cerrotru or other Cerro alloy, Bismuth-Lead, Tin, Cadmium & Indium Alloys which melt at between 160° F and 281° F, low enough that a candle or even boiling water would work. Tin and bismuth can also be melted to make a similar melting alloy.
Allign and File
Matching a proper blank to a functional key in a vice and carefully filing by hand will if done right produce a working copy.
Hand Cuffs
These are simple warded locks with a secret, there is a locking pin on the other side of the cuff that is what the little nub on the back of a cuff key is for. It is a good idea to sew a cuff key into the back of the belt or pants of every radical, it is almost impossible with the double sided nature of cuffs to unlock yourself but two friends could save each other. A loop on the key makes it harder to drop when your hands are behind your back. Shimming the ratchet with a piece of steel or aluminum can might be an option if you are running from the prison work crew if they have been double locked a shim might not work. Buy a real hand cuff set for fooling around with your partner and try to escape while distracted by......
Prox cards
Most prox cards have an encrypted chip that is fed a signal and then responds with an answer via radio frequency. A reader/writer for your card would be needed to hack it. It is easier to pickpocket a prox card from an employee. see Infiltrating
Magnetic Stripe Cards
These are easy to copy and have mostly gone out of use except with ATM and credit cards in the US and Canada. a simple reader/writer could be made using the heads from a "dub" capable dual tape recorder. Move both cards along at the same time and a blanked card should take the magnetic image of the good card.
Practice and Advice
All of these techniques even bumping require practice, go out and buy several different kinds of locks and start playing with them, figure out what a combination lock sounds like when you enter the right combination and what clicks happen at wrong numbers. Learn the feel of a lock pin that is caught at the sweet halfway point so you can go to the next pin.
A good motto for entry is try before you pry. Look for unlocked windows and back doors, maybe kicking the drywall will get you through, is the wall of that bank vault made from easily sledgehammered cinder block? Why spend twenty minutes working on the front door when the fire escape leads to an open window in back?
Stick a Lock
As mentioned elsewhere in this book remember that superglue will seize a lock, first blast the lock with a shot of carbureator cleaner to remove any oils then shoot a whole tube into the keyhole. The lock should be operation and difficult to remove since the pins will be seized, don't do this as a gag, it is an expensive fix as the door may also need to be replaced from the violent removal of the lock mechanism.
Outside Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_picking
http://www.instructables.com/id/E3RGSYZ641EQHOASFH/ Lock pinking Instructable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_cuff#Escaping
http://mia.ece.uic.edu/~papers/etc/pdf00002.pdf MIT Guide to Picking Locks
