It is always best to practice with your lock mounted to a door or wood platform, as they are here, or at least fixed in a vice. For most of the picking methods discussed here, in which tumblers are manipulated one by one, a "hook"-style pick is generally used. Pin tumbler lock picking consists of raising the cuts on each pin stack to the shear line, one by one, until the plug turns freely. Repeat until lock turns: - Locate the pin stack that's being pinched at the shear line (it resists slightly when pushed up) - Continue to push that pin stack up until its cut reaches the shear line and the plug turns slightly. 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. That means being able to reliably pick the lock, both clockwise and counterclockwise, and being confident that you know how you opened it. Once you've picked a cylinder, you should know in exactly what order the pins pick. That's it -- now you know almost everything there is to know about lock picking.

In the lab there is a collection of "training locks," mounted on boards, for practice. It's hard to learn these skills all at once on off-the-shelf commercial locks, but that's what many people who try to learn lock picking end up doing (before giving up in frustration). These are typically pin tumbler locks, but their orientation is "upside down" with respect to the convention for locks installed in the United States. Vertical orientation requires a 90 degree twist in the blade. Most commercial torque tools are designed for horizontal orientation. 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. A functional pick kit should contain several different size hooks to accommodate a range of different keyway shapes.

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 keyways include Arrow ("AR1"), Ilco-Schlage-multiplex ("SX"), Schlage-C ("SC"), and Yale-8 ("Y1"). Unfortunately, these designs are less than ideal, and many of the "standard" picks are too large to fit and move comfortably in common lock keyways. Unfortunately, many of the commercially available lock pick kits consist mostly of useless gimmicks. In lock picking terminology, we say that the pin statck is binding. The basic algorithm for picking locks is remarkably simple: - Apply a small amount of torque to the plug. 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). In practice, of course, locks aren't perfect: the pin holes in the plug are slightly out of alignment with respect to the shell and the pins and pin holes are each of a slightly different diameter. In the lab you'll find a collection of small (12 inch by 18 inch) lock boards, each containing six specially pinned locks with a given keyway.

Small digits represent short bottom pins (that must be pushed up more to reach the shear line); large digits represent longer bottom pins (that need only be pushed up a bit). Longer handles are as a rule better in torque tools; the farther from the plug the torque can be applied, the easier it is to detect and control fine movement. There is a tradeoff, of course, since a longer handle may be difficult to maneuver around obstacles. The LAB picks can comfortably maneuver around even very tight keyways, and are among my personal favorites. The pick must be strong enough to resist bending or breaking while lifting pins, yet the shaft must be small and thin enough to maneuver freely around the keyway without disturbing other pins. The traditional torque tool is made from stiff, flat spring steel, bent at a 90 degree angle to provide a small blade that fits in the keyway and a long handle to which torque is applied. While the LAB picks are quite nice, their small size makes them rather delicate and easy to bend or break, especially as you're learning how much lifting force and torque are involved. Picks probe and lift the individual pin tumblers through the keyway, while torque tools control the degree and force of plug rotation.

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