How to Pick Padlocks

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com, I'm Jim Koch and today we are going to be talking about when you have locked your keys in your house, your garage or lost your keys, how a professional locksmith is going to gain access to your house. I am going to talk a little bit about padlocks. The key with padlocks is the thickest part of the shank. The thicker you can get this shank the better off you are. I've seen some locks that you could literally cut with a pair of wire cutters; one like this. This is a pretty decent one but they actually make them that are thicker. The advantage to this lock is that you can rekey it to match your house and this is a new style of lock that has just come out. I am going to show you a little bit about how to pick that lock. It's going to work very similar to a house. You are going to insert your tension wrench. One of the keys to picking a lot is making sure it is lubed very well. I prelubed this one. Once you've got your tension wrench and you've got just a little bit of tension on it, take your lock pick in and voila your lock is unlocked. Keep in mind that I make this look a little bit easier than most people do. I've been doing this for a long time so I am quite good at what I do and locks tend to pick easy for me. That is pretty much the basics of locks. There is also combination locks. Combination locks are a little tougher and the only real way around those is if they have a code. A lot of times we can look that code up and get the combination from that but for the most part, combination locks 9 time out of 10 is going to get cut off. The other thing that I am going to do is show you another method for picking a lock and that is using a pick gun and this one we are going to insert the tension wrench. Your pick gun you insert that just below the pins. You don't quite want it to touch the pins. Give it a couple of squeezes or in this case, just one squeeze and your lock in unlocked. "