Sun Apr 29, 2012 6:26 pm by MBI
It was interesting to see them using the ASSA-style barrel pins and countermilling.
As for the ARX pins, if you want more info I wrote an article about them in NDE Magazine #4. In short, Medeco first introduced the concept back in 1974. That style of pins eventually fell out of use but was reintroduced in the early 90s under the ARX name, then once again discontinued after a few years. In writing a series of articles for NDE (issues #3 and #4) to publicly introduce Jon King's Medecoder back in 1998, we worked with Medeco who asked for brief delay of a few months to give them time to resume production of those pins as a countermeasure against picks and decoders that exploit that flaw.
Basically, they had millions of standard pins with the full length broached groove already manufactured and sitting in their warehouse. When they resumed making the ARX-style pins with the milled groove with a closed end, they didn't want to waste all those pre-manufactured pins, as they are rather costly. So the solution was to slowly phase in the ARX pins, at first only including one or two per lock, to foil anyone using a groove-grabbing tool to open them. As their supplies of the old style pins has begun to dwindle, you see more and more ARX pins in each lock.