Mastering Lock Picking: Tips for Home and Car Emergencies

[Joe Delaney]

A better link is http://www.hackfaq.org/miscellaneous/pick-locks.shtml , because it has links to a large number of documents about lock picking.

 

[mjb811]

ehh, picking car locks is the old way. I am going for my EE degree but i work at an automotive repair shop/towing and recovery. we have "lockout kits" that have about 25 different tools, each having a use. I can get into any car just as long as it takes for you to take out your key and open ur door, although some cars take longer. its kind of an art to learn but easy if you are good with tools. Door Lock's work on just 6 basic mechanical simple machines.(Lever, Inclined Plane, Wheel and Axle, Screw, Wedge, and Pulley). But, as newer cars come out, Automotive Engineers are not thinking about people who lock their keys in their cars and are making it more challenging for us to get in to.
Now there is On-Star. If you lock your keys in your car, just call up an On-Star dispatcher, and they will unlock your car for you via satellite. The only problem with that is it won't work if you are inside a garage or somewhere where there is a weak or no signal. If all else fails, there's always windows to be broken.

 

[mooberrymarz]

A coat hanger. I locked my keys in the car and this pretty old guy(he looked like bill cosby) told me to fetch a coat hanger from one of the res's nearby and he opened it within a minute. Now that was very nice.

 

[theamazingTWOeyedman]

http://home.howstuffworks.com/lock-picking.htm

There you go :)

 

[BobG]

Buy one of those "Hide a Key" thingies, little tin box with a magnet to stick it some place on your car...Much easier...also search this site, and you wil find another thread on lock picking, with details, from a link to a site, that explains everything for you...

One of the guys I worked with had done that for both his cars for years, only he evidently didn't tell his wife about it (or maybe she just forgot about it).

The only thing funnier than listening to him explain to her over the phone where to find the box on the undercarriage of the car in great detail so she would be sure to find it successfully after hanging up and running back across the parking lot to the locked car was listening to his response to the call back "What do you MEAN there's just a magnet with a rusty old strip of metal attached to it?!"

If you trust at least one of your neighbors, best bet is to hide your house key under the doormat in front of their house so you can find it when you need it. You can be sure they'll be on vacation during your time of greatest need, so you can't just give it to them to hold and if you hide your key under your own doormat, burglars will be sure to find and use it before you ever do.

As for the car, the tin box still sounds attractive enough to try it even I've never heard of an instance where it actually worked - just check up on it once in a while. (plus, I gave a spare to someone I know so if worse comes to worse, I can hope they can come unlock me).

 

[pete_man]

Just buy a key chain!

Hello all.
Instead of doing all that stuff just buy a key chain, hang it around your nech with keys on it!

 

[killerinstinct]

It seems like you are trying to ask people to teach you how to rob somebody's car/house by learning to pick locks. You can arrested for posting this you know. JKJK. I don't know much about this subject anyways. At least i don't lock myself out, no offense!

 

[ethies]

Picking locks is something you learn. Not learn like, how to ride a bike learn. Like how to do calculus learn. Its not easy and most of the time its horribly time inefficient. I've spent far too much of my life attempting to learn this skill. Most house locks (read: Kwikset brand or equivilent) suck. Anyone with five hours of practice and a $15 set of picks is going through. But public building locks are a different story. When I lived in the dorms my school had a policy that stated that anytime you had to be let into your dorm room you were charged $25. Well, my roomate left for the weekend while I was in a friends room and I didn't have my keys, however I did happen to have my lockpicks as my friend had asked to see them. Well 45min of jiggling later I got back into my room avoiding either a $25 fee or a weekend on my friends couch. This is the about the most positive outcome you can get out of spending many many hours honing your skills (unless you're planning on burlarizing something, which most times results very bad consequences). Also, don't get caught carrying your lockpicks, its not really cool. When I was going home with a friend once, he was pulled over for speeding and because we're college kids he wanted to search the car. He did, and patted us down. I had my lockpicks on me. He tried to tell me that he could take me in for having them and gave me a hard time about it, but I had read the appropriate laws for my state and knew that unless he could prove intent I was perfectly safe. However, it still wasn't an experience I wanted to repeat. Check your local law.

 

[Parth Dave]

If you chronically lock yourself out, just hide another set of keys somewhere where no one would find it. For example, with the car, i just duct taped another set to the back of the car (underneath and behind the rear bumper). Around the house, there should be a dozen good places where you can hide extra keys, you just have to find them.

 

[Charity]

Picking locks does take practice, but can be a lot of fun, if you can get the hang of it. Most people don't and give up, but some people just have a knack for it. If you want to learn how, the best way is to see if a friend knows, it's less confusing than many of the net resources. If none of your friends know how, then go to google or another search site and type "lock picking" in. A lot of great sites pop up! Have fun, and don't do anything illegal!

 

[Charity]

As for "Picking locks with paperclips", it really can't be done, unless your house or car is REALLY old and has a crummy, cheap lock. But that probably won't happen. If you want to use paperclips to do your lock picking, might as well stick to opening the cheap lock on a sister's diary, because that's about as far as you can get. Unless you bend the paperclips (yes, you'll need more than one) just so, and that takes more practice than actually picking locks!

 

[Etak]

I knew a locksmith guy.
He hit the door in a particular place and it opened.
I don't know if it was coincidence though...

 

[pack-rat]

I've locked my keyes in my car a number of times. Now I keep an extra key in my wallet: problem solved.

me too.

stash a house key somewhere on the property where no one will find it.

The best thing to do is prevent yourself from locking you keys in your car/house