You must be careful to avoid touching the front-most pin with the blade of the tool, but this position has the advantage of allowing maximum room to maneuver the pick. Bridge. Your bridge is how you position your supporting hand to hold the pool cue. Do not hold them in your lap. You will need a small set of cylinders in various keyways, a board or vice to hold them in while you practice, and a small re-pinning kit (extra pins and springs and a "follower" tool). Becoming skilled at 8 pool requires practice, strategy, what is billiards and knowledge of essential shots. To become a skilled 8 pool player, it’s crucial to have a solid understanding of the essential shots. This style of tool is especially useful for holding open automotive locks that have spring-loaded dust covers. Find the board with the six "Arrow AR1" keyway locks. Each board is labeled with its keyway, and each lock cylinder on a board is labeled with the number of installed pin stacks (from one to six) and the keying code for its pinning. Apply some torque to the plug and feel the two pin stacks with your pick. If just one pin sets at the "other" shear line, the lock will not open even though all the pin stacks are picked.

Congratulations, you've picked the (two pin) lock. 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. They cost between five and eight dollars each from various distributors, depending on the exact configuration. These early ball-and-mallet games appear to have split into variations, each of which seems to have plausibly been the forerunner of later games. Obviously it is a ball-and-mallet games of some sort. Yet other sources indicate that a variant of a ball-and-mallet game evolved into Billiards. The game of pocket billiards, or pool, which uses six large pocket openings, is primarily the game played on the American continents and, in recent years, has been played in Japan. That said, the Peterson hook picks are a bit too large to fit comfortably in more tightly warded keyways, especially those found on higher-security locks. The selection of the torque tool is just as important as that of the pick, but, again, commercial pick kits often fail to include a sufficient range of sizes and designs to allow good control and feel across the range of common locks.

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. The basic recommended pick set for this course includes four picks and four torque tools. The following is a series of self-paced exercises to help you master the basic techniques of pin tumbler lock picking. Note: The author does not stock, sell, or distribute lock tools; if you're not a student in my seminar, please don't ask -- I can't help you. If you're not in my seminar, the references to the lock boards in the lab don't apply, of course; you will need to configure your own training locks to follow these exercises. While there are literally thousands of different keyways in commercial use in the United States and thousands more abroad, these four give a fairly representative sample of the different kinds of wardings (and pin manipulation problems) you are likely to encounter in common (non-high-security) locks.

Falle-Safe Security makes a set of vertically-oriented two-prong torque tools designed to fit snugly in a range of different pin tumbler keyways. The handle of the torque tool serves as a lever to turn the plug. Eventually, you'll reach a point where the plug will turn ever so slightly and the pin will not go up any farther. The term can be used as a verb, "It is your turn to rack." Learn how to rack correctly here. Spend a lot of time playing with the three pin lock so that you can recognize the pin states easily and naturally. However, your efforts un-pinning and re-pinning locks will be time well spent -- you will progress much faster than you would if you tried to start out picking fully pinned cylinders. Many experienced locksmiths and expert lock pickers prefer "home made" tools to the commercial selections, especially for picking unusual and high security locks. Most commercial torque tools are designed for horizontal orientation. This keyway is common in commercial and residential locks in the US, and is close in shape and size to a number of other common keyways, including that used by Kwikset, a very popular (and easily defeated) line of US residential locks.