I have a question about disc detainers aswell... ordered a bunch of locks off ebay recently and one arrived the other day which was, to my surprise, a disc mechanism. I didn't realise this when I bought it, as the pic wasn't clear enough to see the keys. Of course, not long before this particular lock arrived, I decided against buying a disc detainer pick along with the other stuff I treated myself to... talk about irony.
I'm not overly familiar with how they work, but I have an idea of how to pick them and plan to make some kind of makeshift thinger to do me until I get around to ordering one of the dedicated picks. In the meantime... can someone clear a few things up for me? The keyway is rectangular and I can count a number of discs by looking in there... but there are way more discs than cuts in the key, and the discs run down the entire length of the keyway. The bitting in the key is near the tip, so I'm assuming most of the discs don't need to be aligned to any particular angle. So, why all the discs?
Here are a couple of pics so you can see what I'm seeing:
Once I understand that stuff, the next thing is tensioning the lock and knowing how far to rotate each disc. I had a fiddle about with it by doing different things with the key and I'm guessing that if I apply tension to the first disc and slowly rotate the others with something, they'll each stop at a certain point and then I can just repeat that for the others - eventually opening the lock. Am I on the right track here? I've seen the disc picks before and by the looks of it they tension the first disc, so that's where my idea is coming from. If I'm not on the right track, what sort of things should I be feeling for? Is there such a thing as an overset disc? So many questions running through my head right now.
Thanks in advance, everyone!