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my story is quite funny. it was when i was about 12 i was going drinking with my mates and as i left the house my ma got into the shower. so i went out and had fun getting locked then i headed back to my friends house for the night, i think i stayed there till about 6 the next day so when i got home i thought it strange that my ma was'nt there or so i thought untill i heard a scream from the bathroom she had broken the key in the door when she was trying to unlock the door and had been locked in the room for 26 hours "might i add there is no windows in the bathroom". the funniest thing i thought was we had hollow doors so she had broken a tweezers in half and tried to scratch trough the door.lol anyways i called a locksmith to come out and thought it was cool so i became fascinated with picking and still am to this day.

Drinking at 12? Never underestimate the value of early training - and constant practice.

Amen to that brother!

When I was a kid, I would pass a locksmiths shop everyday. I always wondered about it but never really did anything to for fill my curiosity. So recently I was bored and went scouring the internet, as people often do when they have nothing better to do. Found a video where a guy picked a lock, and thought it was really cool, brought back the memory of passing the smiths place everyday, so I joined up here and plan to learn a lot about locksport. I've also always been one for puzzles.

i wish i knew about youtube a few years ago. i got started by locking myself out of my room. so i went online and searched for lock picks. i didnt know the first thing about lock picks exept they were magical tools that could unlock all locks. of course when i got them i was more than dissapointed. i was frustrated and i must of read the book "easy picking" that came with my beginner pick set a thousand times. but finaly after a year or so of picking them up and putting them down i opened a cheap master lock with a snake rake. after that i still didnt use them much. i picked them up again about a year ago and have grown in my skill. and i still dont consider myself to be a great lock picker but when i get a lock i will not stop trying to pick it. i dont care how long it takes ive learned that this skill requires a lot of patience. oh yea by the way i dont know if anyone has read the book "easy pickings" but it is the best informational book for beginners. i recomend that all beginers read it.

My interest was "sparked" many years ago but i couldn't find any real
information on the subject , so i just pushed the idea into a corner
of my mind.
Many years passed and i was working as a maintenance man ,
when locksmithing came up in conversation and i was told that one
of our ex-employees was a good amateur lockpicker , nowadays we
have the internet and youtube just oozing with info' and videos.
I couldn't help it , i went all Google and was hooked instantly , pity
i couldn't find all this stuff 20 odd years ago !

My interest in locks started when I was younger, me and my friends used to blow locks off of gates with our rifles, then I started just taking them apart and looking at them, then I bought a set of southord picks, broke and bent most of them, and gave away the ones that were still good to a guy that wanted to learn to pick. I bought a good set of HPC's and started picking locks in the breakroom on breaks with a huge audience, been addicted ever since then, I get bored with it, but every few days now I still find myself picking at home, and my job I manage to have to pick a few locks a week.

actually wizwazzle aka awol70 got me started with his vids and now i can open mul t lock interactives no problom still takes me 15 min none the less but thanks wiz. =) now im a locksmith in tc, mi

Lots of details to sift through in my story...I was born at a very early age...An uncle of mine did some pretty cool magic with a coin for me when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. That piqued my interest in doing magic. Learning one day about Houdini, he quickly became a hero to me; I started to read everything I could get my grubby hands on about him and began to practice the things I read about his doing. (I even became pretty good at tying and untying knots in rope with my toes). When it came to his work with locks and handcuffs, a new obsession arose and I started to collect all kinds of locks and keys. I got bored one day (a common theme in this thread), just looking at my collection (about age eleven) and started to take a few of them apart to see how they work. By age twelve I had taught myself how to pick them and made a ton of tools out of everything I could find, from paper clips to street sweeper bristles. One day I was helping my grandmother clean out her attic and we found an old Chicago double-bitted wafer padlock without keys. I took it to a local locksmith and asked him if keys could be made for it. He said to leave it for about an hour. When I returned, he had made a key, and I was all the more romanced by the magic of locksmithing. Fast forward through my teen years, locksmithing correspondance course, a couple years of college, then a terriffic apprenticeship; and for the next 30-some years, I am now both the fascinating magician and the wizzard of locksmithing.

Mine is close to lockylew. I got inspired of the sport of lock picking by playing the game Fallout 3. I wondered if it could be done and I found out that you could do it with paper clips. Later on i got my commercial picks and still practicing.

i first started in Iraq in the Marine Corps in 2006. i was on a team of 8 guys in the middle of nowhere, we were positioned far away from any civilization and other marines so we had limited supplies. we had a CWO2 (our commanding officer) sitting behind a comfortable desk and air conditioning 4 miles from our position so as far as he was concerned, we were just as happy.
most units, when they need something, usualy within a month, they get it. I.E. beds, food, air conditioning, ammo, whatever. we did not have that luxery, our officer was a fucking retard that hated us so we were on our own.

we had no beds, no a/c, no roof over our heads, 1 humvee that fits 4 marines, but 8 marines needed to drive the 4 miles to chow hall 2 or 3 times a day. so we took turns eating either every other day, or every other meal.

thats when it happend,

we started stealling!

it was fucking survival at that point, 135 degrees, black flag on all the bases meaning no training or pt, dont be caught without water, that kinda shit, and all our water was sitting out in the fucking sun because the few cammo nettings we had we had been using for our shade while we slept in the fucking sand.

so we stold a humvee from a nearby unit lol. that solved our chow hall rotation problem, we stole that and then painted our unit symbol on the door should they come asking about it.

then we stole 6 BOOs, those are 6ft tall air conditioning units that can cool up to 1000sq ft of a room per unit (big score)

then we bought drugs and booze off the iraqis and traded them to the Navy Seabees (construction workers and engineers for the navy) and they in turn built us a massive wooden hut that slept 8 marines comfortably. they also built us a secondary hut that we used as our gaming and party room, cause we had money to buy xboxs and tvs and dvd players but had never had a place to use them or hook them up.

then came the beds..
i was driving to the chow hall and saw a marine was cleaning his hut out cause he was in trouble for some reason and had all his shit out infront of his hut, so i jacked his bed! fuckem, he could get a new one in 24 hours, i couldnt. so finaly after 3 months, i had a bed and a roof over my head with a/c.

then we found a secret tent on camp fallujah that was no shit guarded, we found out what was inside of it, about 100 unbuilt beds, tvs, a/c units, mini fridges ect, so we had one of our marines create a diversion to get the sentry off guarde, crawled under the tent, and snuck 7 more beds and mini fridges out the back door.

then we found a unit that had left town (camp fallujah) and left all their ammenaties behind for the recovering unit, things like large water bowls (large water tanks that hold up to 3 months worth of water for a small team) phones, office chairs, dry erase boards, desks, and the bell of the ball..... a fucking large deep freezer and a 6 foot fridge!

after about 4 months of stealling and collecting, we were the most established unit near the base of fallujah with hook ups to the local ice house (where the iraqis made you ice for a good trade of dope or mulla) we had 3 humvees at that point, and shit, we even stole cinderblocks and built our own cement grill, our sargeant was fucking a girl from supply so she was able to hook us up with hamburgers and steak from the chow hall.

we had it made so well we had female marines in and out of our stag house like it was a fucking bad 1980s fraternatiy movie going on!

we just tell em, hey, we got our own little position about 4 miles from here, a/c, dope, booze, coke from amsterdam (when a marine gets injured, he goes to germany to heal, then they take all the broke dicks to amsterdame to get laid and make em happy and then return them to iraq without going through customs) it was a god damn fuckfest and steak buffet every night for the last 2 months we were in country.

so where does lock picking come in?

the second tour i realized that while stealing from people is questionable, i am always willing to steal what is considered a necessity for survival from others who have more than they need. so i specificaly bought a lock pick set and a grip of master locks online during my second tour to learn how to pick locks so id never go hungry or go wanting for something again. but the second tour, we had everything cause the marines before us had stolen everything we could possibly need.

i did pick a US issue american pad lock that was secured to a metal cable that was wraped around the steering wheel of a humvee that we stold. we needed it more than them, fuck em!

i will say this, excluding military installations and bases, i have never stolen another thing while being back here in america, i refuse to do it.

but.... some day, many years down the road, i may need to SURVIVE again, and my tools and unique skills will come into play, and be rest assured... the sandman will live fat and happy again while the others suffer for my glutany! hahahahahahahah bahahahahahha wooohahahahahaha whoooahahahahahahahah hahahah!

I guess that Marine "adapt and improvise" strategy does pay off, doesn't it?

Here's my story:

I've always been a deviant fuck... interested in the arcane and forbidden. I like to walk the fine line between wisdom and insanity. I recall being super obsessed with keys as a kid. I had boxes of keys... I remember having Yales.. Sargents... Russwins... a shitload of kwiksets.. schlages... and some strange ones I still can't recall the name of today. I didn't do anything with these keys except keep them.. I liked how they looked. My favorite key on the planet is a vintage original Russwin H5 6-Pin. The key bow is just smooth looking, very stylish... Russwin made excellent keys before the company was Om-Nom'ed by Corbin (look at their Russwin vintage 5-pin key.. it has fucking dragons on it... dragons that are fucking). I'm rambling now so back on point. My lockpicking adventure strated when me and my buddy (Xrax) went to an army navy store looking for more deviant shit to buy and fuck around with. As soon as we walked in the shop I walked over to a glass display case and saw two leather cases with lockpicks in them. I immediately bought it (along with a long steel retractable cop baton >:]). The cashier began to harass me and asked what I was going to use the picks for to which I responded "to pick locks". What the fuck else would I buy a lockpick set for? I should have told her that I was going to use them to clean my fingernails. These picks were cheap alluminum thin pieces of trash with a bunch of rigid tensioners. We both bought a set. Xrax got the jump on me with picking, he bought a Brinks padlock and started picking it. I let the pickset sit idle until going over Xrax's place one day he told me he had opened the padlock... I gave it a try and screwed around for an hour or so until it finally popped. I didn't know shit about binding order or any of that nonsense, I just stuckin my half diamond and started dicking around. Once I popped that open I magically became obsessed. We bought a bunch of Master locks and spent literally 8-12 hours one night picking every lock we could find. I found I had a magical knack for jiggling("too much coffee technique"); <-- that's for you elbow ... them open with a This quickly lost its luster as it didn't work on all the locks. Eventually I switched to SPP with a and now here I am slaughtering all kinds of crazy shit.

I must say, if it weren't for this website I wouldn't have progressed so quickly. So, thank you all whom I have talked to and traded locks. You're all aces in my book.

Me dad is a sorth of lock placer , and just some youtube RANDOM vids you get in you're youtube front page (Wizwazzle ofc :p )

As a kid I learned to shim the back door lock at home. The motivating factor was a late parent and near freezing rain. After that I and my siblings never bothered with carrying a key. Of course as a kid I didn't have a credit card so the tools was either a hand trowel or a hoe. (For any semi-literates a "hoe" is a tool while a "ho" is an entertainment center.)

I forgot my key one day and opened my office door with a paper clip. At work I became the designated office door opener, instead of calling and waiting for security. Shitty locks that either could be bypassed with an ID card or for the poorly fitted doors (most) using a bent paper clip to depress the locking leaver.

Later one of my contractors gave me a few picks and a couple of locks and I have been playing with them since. (I really don't practice enough.)

My hands are too heavy - for lack of a better description - or not sensitive to the feel the picks. Also unless I'm picking at home late in the evening when everything is quiet I cannot hear the pins. (Laugh now you too will be in your late 40s someday.)