ASSA 700 (SCD) a k a The Great White Widen, er, Whale. That broke my favorite hook. Revenge is mine!
If the lock looks a bit worn, it's absolutely not because I have been poking at this damn thing off and on for
months - the lock opened in sheer terror once I waved some picks in front of it and laughed at its puny mushroom-cloud* driver pins, torpedo key pins, deep counter-milling and overall nastiness.
Finally!
Actually wasn't THAT hard once I got a solid false set going... just took like, 5 attempts to set them all and lots of poking around to feel for the slight counter-rotation. And then fiddling around with like 5 different hooks trying to find the proper one to work the pin out of the countermilling. There seems to be two levels of false set, one very shallow and one deeper. I guess the first one is when the wide "rings" around the pins aren't above sheer? Atleast the pins seem to stay set once they go out of the deep one, but maybe I just got lucky.
Getting that far was quite the chore though... Before I understood how the torpedo key pins behaved I couldn't for the hell of me understand why the pins wouldn't stay set. Mildly embarassing, but hey, I won at last! Those key pins are hell. I've poked around a bit at another 700 and I almost have to keep notes of how far you can lift each pin before they bite you. And it's not like it's very noticeable when they do either - only way I've been able to tell it apart from actually setting the pin is by sound.
* usually known as xmas tree pins, but that's far too jolly a name for these instruments of horror!