Tue Jan 15, 2019 9:34 am by huxleypig
So now Abus have changed the lock again to have butterflies at the rear AND the front! So what then? There is a 0 driver disc in there somewhere, it is randomly placed between the butterflies. Sometimes this means it is in position 2 though, which means you can just use a front tension too and pick up on disc 2 instead of the front-most disc. The tensioner keeps the front butterfly in place as you tension disc 2. Likewise, sometimes it is the disc right in front of the rear butterfly so you can use a thicker tensioner and pick on both the rear 2 discs for tension.
If it is in any of the other 5 positions then you have a problem. A problem with many solutions though. The most common trick is to tension using a butterfly anyway and try to feel for the gates on the other discs. When you think everything is right you find the actual 0 with your picking tip and rotate the tensioner back round 1 position. I do not like this though because you are falling right into the trap Abus want you to and the feedback is crappy (by design). You can use no tensioner at all and use 2 picking tips - one tip tensions from a disc and the other picks the discs the other side of that disc. As the tension pick will be in the middle of the pack, the tips are swapped around when it is time to pick the discs the other side of the tension disc, so the original tension picking tip becomes the pick and vice versa. This method works well and I like it but it is very difficult to stop the tension tip from slipping off the disc, which gets very annoying. So a third solution that I invented was the 3-in-1. It has its tensioner in the middle and a pick either side. It is good for tensioning the front disc, the rear disc, or any disc in the middle and always having a pick on the correct side(s) of the tensioner. This works the best IMO. I will pick a disc at the front and tension...if I get no feedback from picking the other discs then I just go down the stack a disc with the tensioner until I start getting good feedback. Then you have found the driver disc and it should be plain sailing from there.
I have since developed a few other solutions that bypass the butterfly discs. I call them the "Butterflypass" (see what I did there?) and they allow you to tension from the rear or front butterfly without the butterfly going too far. It turns it back into a basic DD. I also have another couple of tricks that allow you to tension the lock in totally new ways, again, getting around the butterfly disc tensioning issue.
Abus actually included another anti-pick mechanism in the newer Abus Plus locks but it is totally ineffective. They have let all the washers wobble 20 degrees and the pack is under a little spring tension, meaning that when you move 1 disc all the others discs in the pack move a little too. The idea is that if a picker can't ever stop all the other discs moving when picking up on one of them then the lock will be impossible to pick. And in theory this is right, if you set a disc and then it moves when you go to another disc life would become infuriating. The problem is that they did not account for the downwards pressure from the sidebar when under tension. This pressure keeps a binding disc in place and also keeps a set disc in its gate despite the wobble of the rest of the (as yet unset) pack. So it is totally useless, but good try Abus!
