How To: March 2006 Archives

Last year, there was some coverage of a slow, but effective, technique to open a Master combination lock. If you don't need to save the lock and don't have time to go through the algorithm, you might want to just try opening it with a screwdriver, as shown in this video I made:

I'm not sure if this video just demonstrates the obvious -- I wasn't even sure it was worth a post -- but I thought I'd provide it just in case. I learned that this would work when I was about 12 years old, so it's not a very sophisticated approach.

The lock shown in the video is not a Master Lock, but the technique works with those, too. You might need something a little narrower to pry the dial up, and it takes a little longer, but it shouldn't take more than about 5 minutes. I don't know anything about locks, really. If I did, the video would probably be about 75 percent shorter. (You can see me poking at various irrelevant parts of the lock in the video.)

The best technique, in my opinion, is the shim. But if you don't have a shim, the screwdriver technique is not a bad option.

ps. the video is an an iPod-compatible mpeg4.