Title: Practical Lock Picking, A Physical Penetration Tester’s Training Guide

Author: Deviant Ollam

Completed: December 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: I’ve been into lock picking for years. I don’t remember when I got started but it was probably around 2010. Back in 2016, I challenged students at One Stone to pick a lock in my Maker Space to win the prize inside the locker. Then in 2024 I gave a presentation to Washington CTE teachers about using lock picking to teach engineering.

Despite picking scores of locks over more than a decade, I still feel there’s a lot to learn. This book reviewed a lot of what I’ve learned already and helped me learn a few new things. If you’re just getting started picking locks, this book will give you the basics, but there are so many other resources available to do that in a shorter format. That said, this goes over the basics and dives a lot deeper than the shorter ones. If you know you want to get into this hobby, this book provides everything you need to get from knowing nothing to knowing how to pick fairly advanced locks.

Highlights:

• Remember, it’s not a lock’s job to hold something shut. You can easily prevent someone from, say, accessing a particular room of your house by applying brick and mortar to the doorway. That will surely keep unwanted people out, right? What’s the problem with such a solution? The answer, of course, is that such a solid wall of stone isn’t the best thing to have if you’re also concerned with allowing authorized people in. That is what locks attempt to do for us…they assist in giving otherwise robust security a means of quickly, easily, and reliably opening when necessary.
• our deadbolts, our padlock shackles, and other similar hardware that actually provide the means by which things remain shut. Our locks are mechanisms that simply trigger the release of said deadbolts and shackles at (we hope) the appropriate time.
• It is a common misconception that pins (particularly the key pins) within a lock can come from the manufacturer in a wide array of varying sizes. In fact, the key pin sizes (and the corresponding depths of the bitting cuts on the blade of the key) only appear in regular, evenly-spaced intervals. I have never encountered a manufacturer who utilized more than nine or ten distinct sizes of key pin in this simple design of lock (and thus, their keys only featured nine possible distinct depths of cut). Many manufacturers fabricate their whole line of lock products with as little as five or six possible bitting depths.
• consider for a moment the small points of metal that protrude upward from the blade in between the flat lands of each bitting cut. These are a natural result of the size and shape of the cutting wheel and the distances by which each bitting cut are separated from one another. The resultant “points” that remain in between the cuts on the blade of a key can provide a satisfying series of perceived “clicks” as the blade rides into the keyway (as each pin stack passes across the ridges), but the points themselves are not a crucial element of the lock’s easy and successful operation.
• Most locks, if you look closely, will exhibit at least a few signs of such imperfection. Many products, in fact, will be glaringly deficient in their quality control.
• If you are starting to learn lockpicking and it isn’t going well, the odds are overwhelming that the problem has to do with your use of the tension tool… specifically, too much pressure being applied to it.
• Occasionally, the terms “edge of the plug” and “center of the plug” will be substituted for “standard” and “flat”, respectively. Such terms refer to where in the plug the tools are inserted, as you will soon see. (As always, I’ll point out here that I greatly prefer these terms over any designations that are region-specific. Some people will make reference to “top of the keyway” and “bottom of the keyway” but, for reasons that I have discussed in Chapter 1, I try to break people out of the habit of using those sorts of names.)
• see how high you can comfortably lift it in the direction of the pin stacks. You may be able to observe that at certain positions you are rather limited in your lifting range (Figure 3.14), while other times you can reach very far up beyond the keyway (Figure 3.15). You are feeling the pin chambers and the flat spaces between them. Bear in mind, you should never concern yourself with lifting the pins beyond the “top height” that you can reach in-between pin stacks (the height felt in Figure 3.14), since a normal operating key in a typical pin tumbler lock would never need (or indeed, be able to) lift up beyond the height of the keyway.
• Two exceedingly different-length pins cannot usually occupy chambers directly next to one another. This is because cuts on the blade of a key must be made at specific, gently-sloping angles.
• Many times, it’s far more efficient and a great deal easier to bypass locks instead of picking them. The term bypassing does not refer to the act of, say, finding a particular door to be locked and then going through a window instead. No, bypassing is the act of triggering the release of a locking mechanism without manipulating the pins or combination mechanism in the traditional “picking” sense.
• Interestingly, homemade shims fabricated from thin metals like beverage can aluminum are often the best tool for the job on dual-latching padlocks. Factory-made metal shims are often much thicker, which can result in difficulty during insertion and twisting. Some locks simply don’t have enough “wiggle room” in between the shackle and the lock body to accommodate two thick steel shims. The thin aluminum shims often fit into these sorts of crevices with ease, however.
• Often, it is possible to lock a doorknob or handle, but this merely prevents the knob itself from turning, it does nothing to secure the latch itself. As anyone who has watched old spy-themed TV shows knows, slipping thin material (on television and in films a credit card is a popular device for this purpose) into the crack near the doorjamb can often result in the latch becoming disengaged temporarily. This is known as “loiding” and many times it works just as quickly as viewers are led to believe.
• One of the most common modifications (one which I perform upon every new tubular lockpicking tool that I acquire) is the removal of a “reset washer” which is often installed by default.
• I am often asked exactly what the best setting is for this adjustable collar component on a tubular pick tool. Like many aspects of lockpicking, there is no single hard-and-fast rule upon which you can rely… but I have found what I believe to be a decent “average” standard that you can at least use as a benchmark. Try the following… unscrew the adjustable ring somewhat on your tubular pick. Now, using just a single finger, spin it back in the “tightening” direction until it stops. From this point of slight friction, turn the ring an additional quarter-turn tighter. That is a healthy baseline..