 All right, this is going to be an intro to lock picking. I'm going to go through the basics of how you pick a lock, kind of the concept behind it, and what you want to be thinking about when you go and start practicing on some of our practice locks that we have over there in the tool tables. So yes, we do have rules. This is important because obviously the things that we're teaching can be used in the wrong way. And we are going to kind of outline how we do it so that it's not construed in the wrong way. Of course, the first one is don't pick anything that you don't own. This should be obvious, but it's also because if you're learning, you're probably going to mess things up. And you want to do that on your own lock. And the other one is also if you're practicing and you're potentially liable to mess it up, you don't want to do this on something that you rely on. Like if you're trying it to your own house door and you mess it up, that's just going to be more of a headache for you. So you want to avoid doing that. I mean, a good source is eBay locks. They're cheap people who lost keys. It's something to practice on. So it is actually a really simple thing. It just takes a bit of practice. And don't get discouraged if at first when you start trying it, it just takes you a long time because usually the first lock you pick takes maybe an hour if it's a hard one. So the lock that I'm going to teach you how to pick, well, tool in general, the first lock you learn is a pin tumbler lock. There are a wide range of locks out there. But the most common one that you'll find, especially in the United States, is a pin tumbler lock like you would see on your house, et cetera. You'd also see it on padlocks. And here's a close-up version of it. And basically, the concept of a pin tumbler lock is you have an inner cylinder and an outer cylinder. The outer cylinder obviously feeds into the door. That's what mounts the lock. The inner cylinder is what turns when you stick the key inside. Now, what makes it lock and unlock is that you have a series of two cylinders in there, pins, pin stacks with the springs. And what the key does is the key pushes up that bottom pin so that the lines all match up. And I think there's a nifty, yeah, there we go. So you have the spring, the driver pin, and the key pin. The key pin is called that because that's what the key touches. And when you insert the key into the lock, all of the lines line up at the shear line. And that is really what you're trying to do when you pick a lock is you're just emulating what a key does. So if you're trying to do without a key, obviously you have this chunk of metal in there that's preventing you from rotating the plug. So the lock doesn't open. When you stick a key in there, everything lines up and it can turn. Now, this is just a picture of one pin. So in more advanced locks, obviously you have four or five pins. Some can have up to seven pins. So here's an example of a side view cutaway for a five pin lock. This is fairly common for padlocks or house locks. And when you stick a key in, they all line up simultaneously and the lock can open. So obviously, when you don't have a key and you're trying to pick a lock, you're not going to be able to get them all simultaneously right off the bat. So you have to do it one at a time. Yeah, and if you miss it by one, the lock doesn't open. So that's how you have, if you have a different key, it doesn't open the lock because it only takes one pin not to be in place in order for that lock not to open. Same thing goes if it's too high. So the only reason that we are able to pick locks at all is because of manufacturing tolerances. When you actually make a product, it's impossible to make it perfect. No matter how hard you try, there will always be some amount of imperfection and that is precisely the thing that you exploit when you go and pick a lock. Because if it was perfect, you would actually have to set every single pin simultaneously in order to open the lock. Luckily for us, that's not the case. So you see, in the real world, there's chamfers, there's dings, there's dents. The actual position of each hole is slightly off and even if this amount is on the order of a mill or two, that's enough to exploit. So you can kind of see, this one doesn't really line up in a straight line. Well, maybe you can see. So if you notice, we have the dotted line, which is if you had a theoretically, perfect alignment of holes. In the real world, they're not aligned. So when you actually go to pick the lock, you can push up one pin at a time and it kind of clicks a little bit. And when you hit that shear line for the first pin, the click is basically the difference between that perfect alignment. Because if they were all in a line, you wouldn't get that click. But because some of them are slightly offset, you are able to very, very slightly rotate the cylinder for that one pin. So when you go in and do this on an actual lock with five pins on it, you have to use your tension wrench to kind of determine what the first one that binds is. Now, it's going to be different on every single lock because it depends on that specific lock and how it was manufactured. So part of the practice of lock picking is being able to feel what that first binding pin is. And a lot of times you can either rake through all the pins first to kind of get a feel for which one is sticky first. And then as you can see from this graphic, you go kind of down the line. You try the first one. Once you get that one set, you can go to the next one and so forth. So here, you know, you've set three pins now. So there's only two left. It gets a little bit harder and practice wise because you need to have just the right amount of tension. If you have too much tension, you'll basically won't be able to push the pin up. And if you have too little, you'll kind of undo what you've just done. So a common beginner mistake is that you kind of wail on the torque tool. You want to use a very light tension actually because the tension wrench is the more important tool. The pick just kind of manipulates the pins up and down, but it's really the tension wrench that will open the lock for you. So yeah, this is what happens if you over lift. If you try and kind of use too much force on your pick or your tension wrench, you could actually push the stack too far up. You may not notice. Also, if you happen to get them in the wrong order, you will be able to pick maybe four of the five pins, but the last one will just kind of elude you and then you may have to kind of start over again. So it does take some practice in this. Yeah, it does take two tools to pick locks unlike most movies that show you this. And like I was saying, the turning tool, torque wrench, whatever you want to call it, it's a way that you apply torque to the inner cylinder is probably the more important tool. And there are a few different varieties which I can go into later. You can see that that's generally how you can use the thing. If you, I don't know if we have a picture of this, but if you're applying so much force that your finger turns white, you're pushing too hard. So make it so that you don't have, use that much force, because you really don't need it in most locks. So there's a couple of different types of turning tools. I think, yeah, there's ones that are turned 90 degrees and then ones that are not. And you can use them for different purposes and getting different amounts of torque. Also, one of those things, it's good to practice because a lot of people have their own preferences for tools and stuff, which works better for them. And the same thing goes for pick shapes. Each one of these can have its own specific use. It's also common for certain lock pickers to just kind of like one type more than another or prefer it. So this is an example of what you would do with a hook. Hook is good for picking in one pin at a time, which is the more delicate way and kind of the more accurate way of doing it because raking just kind of goes, you go back and forth and you kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best. With a hook, you're actually feeling each individual pin and trying to set it one at a time. So it gives you a good feel for what the inside of the lock is. Once again, if you use too much force, that's gonna happen to your pick. You're just gonna bend it. And in some cases, you can break it off in the lock and then you're really screwed because now you have to kind of pull this chunk of metal out of the lock that's chained in there. So be careful about that. And when you go over to the table, you can practice some of these exercises and anyone in a tool shirt can help you with a lot of these things. But a good way to start is you do it without tension so you can kind of get a feel for what the spring will do because it will feel different when you start applying torque. It'll feel, you'll have more resistance in it because once you add tension, you're going to have the binding top pin so it'll be a little bit stiffer. And the trick is, when you start pushing up the pin, you kind of have to feel for when that binding pressure suddenly releases. It'll be kind of like a, it'll be a release of force basically. And when you get the lines to line up, no picture, anyways, when you get the lines to line up, the force will suddenly be much less. And that's what you're feeling for when you pick a lock. So a lot of times, you don't actually need to look at the lock at all. It's all by feel. So it's whenever you feel that that particular pin has set, you can move on to the next one. So on the tables out there to practice are a bunch of basic sets. And they look like this. They're just standard contemplative locks that you might see in your house or whatever. But we start with the one pin, which is the easiest, which is what we were describing. It's just a single pin. So you just have to practice it kind of without any other interaction. So it's kind of, it's a nice and easy start. And you can go to two and three pins, which get successively harder. And then eventually you get up to the five pin. And then after that you can go on to either the advanced set or some of the other random locks we have laying around. But it is a good place to start, especially with two or three pins. It gives you kind of a feel for what it's like more than one pin, because one pin's pretty easy. You just kind of push it up until it turns. Here it's kind of like how you should hold your pick. You don't want to kind of grab it on the sides. You want to hold in such a way that you can actually get kind of a feedback because a lot of this is feel. You don't want to like, grab it in such a way that there's a lot of force, I guess. Same thing goes for the tension rinse. Yeah, relax when you're doing it because over tensioning it is a common problem. And a lot of times you can be kind of working away at a lock, it'll be taking you 10, 20 minutes and you'll be wondering why it's not opening. And then you just release tension on your finger and it opens, which may seem counterintuitive, but it happens a lot. Because you were actually just, you were pushing so hard that the top pins were kind of jamming in place. Yes, and then eventually you'll get it open and it'll be great. So that was the intro talk. If you have other specific questions, there are a lot of tool people out there on the tables. There's a lot of locks and a lot of practice picks. Any specific details, you can feel free to ask me afterwards or any of the people in the tool shirts out there.