 Hello everybody. This is Alex with a cool lock that I've had a little while. This actually is another one that came off of the pod. So the first thing I'd say is it had absolutely no corrosion or anything on it, so it made pretty well. I believe these are made in China, but I don't recall. Yep. You can see the Chinese lettering on the back of the key. For a Chinese lock I'd say it's a very good quality lock. What's cool about it is the key. Here's the key. It's a barrel style. That's the bidding on it. So there's like little steps in there. And it looks like the way it's made is that there's a piece, a separate piece in the center here. They mill that, and then this part is, you know, fit in somehow. So it would probably be difficult to duplicate. You need these little ridges on the sides for reasons we'll see in a moment. Here is the keyway. You'll see it has a little guard on it, or like kind of like the door on a store lock. Yeah. And you just you just turn it, and if you hear that, the bidding on the key just engaged with the pins, with the key pins. And now, so if I were to pull this out, you'd see that the bidding is at this angle than we were seeing before. Okay, move up a little bit. So we just shove this in here, and then rotate quarter turn or so, and then she helps open them, not key retaining. So I'm gonna gut this lock here, and because I actually want to see what's going on inside, because I've been trying to pick it for a while, without any success. There's a lock where you can now you can really see the key pin there, and the key in rotates, and there's a little detent or a little pin there that limits the rotation. I wanted to get in here and see what the pins look like, because I've been having a heck of a time picking it, and I want to know if it's due to tension issues, or that I should be expecting other pins. There is nothing in here to grab on to. The back of the keyway is solid and round. It's kind of a conical shape like the end of the key. I'm going to stop and attempt to take this apart, replace the battery in my camera, and come back and we'll see what's inside. Okay, we're back with this LSL lock, which is made in, I'm assuming China, it could be Japan. Here's the bow of the key if anybody reads one of those languages, think in English. So very curious set of pins in here. Okay, so if I can do this without getting in the way. We have five spools and a ball bearing in chamber six. This is one that's the front of the keyway. It's six. This is just a detent to give it a little bit of spring tension in the open and closed position. This is not part of the locking mechanism. We have a spool, spools of equal size in all five chambers. We have two, what appear to be steel pins in positions two and three. So that's a security feature. And then the weird pin is pin number one. So the key is on this side, driver's on this side. So you've got a little milled part here, fat part here, and a thin part down here. Okay, that's pin one. Notice how long it is. All of the other key pins also have a fat part on the top followed by a thin part on the bottom. Okay, you might think that that's some kind of spulerific deal, but it's not. If we grab the plug, look at the plug, you can see that all of the chambers are, I believe that's counter milled. That is there because there's no warding to keep the pins from falling out. So those little lips and the fat part of the pin keeps the pin from dropping all the way through and the lock falling apart, which is undesirable. Now it gets weirder. Let me focus again. On the barrel, on the plug, there is a second little tube that it goes into. Okay, and this is a little weird, but I think I figured out what happens. So pin one, which would be here, when it's in place, the top of it is flush with the top of this little tube. So it does not want to be set any higher. If it goes any higher, it's going to bind. So that may be an anti-picking kind of deal. It explains why I'm having so much trouble picking the lock, but I believe that it also means that if you're applying tension to that pin, this is going to tend to slip a little bit. I don't know how well that shows up, but there's a little bit of play this way and this way against the other pins. He's raised up above the shear line now and there's some play in this. He's able to rock around partly because of the shape of the pin and also just because there's a little bit of tolerance there. It's going to tend to make him want to bind almost almost kind of like a serration, right? So if you're applying tension to the the whole deal, it's going to want to bind and then you've got those spools in there with, which have very very thin lips on them. You can see how thin the lips are on this guy. I don't have a mic on me, but you know, that's a at most a millimeter. It's probably less than that. So I suspect that they're around the same thickness as the metal in that tube and they're going to get all sorts of bound up in there. So I'm explaining why I'm having, I've had so much trouble trying to get this open. So it's basically a five pin lock, all spools. If you think, if you now know what's going on in the lock, and this may just be the way this one is bidded, or they may all be this way, but it's really a four pin lock because pin one really can, you don't want to move it at all, or the whole thing's going to bind up. And then two steel pins and then two more regular bottom pins and spools. So I would, I'm actually pretty impressed with how this is constructed, particularly since it's Chinese and it was a bit expensive and I don't feel ripped off at all. I did a little scratching on the, well you can see, but I did a little bit of scratch testing on the, you can see that there, one with the pick and one with the screwdriver. And it scratched a little bit, but I think it's at least case hardened. It wasn't, I wasn't really pulling much metal off. It was just painting it a little bit. So this seems to be at least vaguely hardened. Those little, these little half moon shaped things that form a little gate there also seem to be hardened, but they spin around so they're not really, they can be able to drill those anyhow. And you cannot bypass it because the back of the plug is solid. There's no way to get a wire or anything back in there. Is there a tiny little hole? It might be like the smallest of little tiny holes there where the drill went through, but you know, you're not getting, you're not bypassing that. So, so challenge is picking this lock and I hope I can pick it on camera at some point or even the couch. Tensioning it, because there is no warding or anything to grab on to, you pretty much have to press against the pins. And I think now that I've seen the inside, which is part of why I took it apart, I mean just tension on pin one because I know that I don't, I actually don't even want him to move. So if I put a whole bunch of tension on him, he should stay still for me and we'll see what happens there and then work with these other pins. So it's, it's gonna be a challenge, but you know, has to be doable. So there's our LSL lock gutted and hopefully be following us up in the near future with a video of it being picked open. This is Alex. Thank you for watching. Please subscribe if you like my work and as always, have fun with your lock sport activities while keeping them legal. Thanks so much. Cheers.