No one would be surprised if you showed that you could cut a hole in pretty much any normal door given the right cutting tool. Yet people seem to act surprised and betrayed to learn that a normal lock can be picked or broken given the right tool.
No one would be surprised if you showed that you could cut a hole in pretty much any normal door given the right cutting tool. Yet people seem to act surprised and betrayed to learn that a normal lock can be picked or broken given the right tool.
And that's fair and reasonable. Of course you can cut a hole in a door. Everyone capable of forming thoughts on the subject has seen someone use a saw at some point in their life. However, locks greatly exaggerate their abilities, to the point you can forgive someone for believing that they actually mean them.
I just now went to masterlock.com, clicked HOME & PERSONAL > View All Products, and picked the very first product[0]. It says:
> The 4-pin cylinder prevents picking and the dual locking levers provide resistance against prying and hammering.
The very first thing it says is that it prevents picking. To someone who isn't familiar with LPL, and who doesn't want to have someone pick their lock, this seems like a great product. It prevents picking! And it must, because otherwise it would be illegal to say that, right? But alas, it does not, in fact, prevent picking.
Compare that to a random product page for a household front door[1] that says "Steel security plate in the frame helps to resist forced entry" and "Reinforced lock area provides strength and security for door hardware", which indicates that this might be a strong door, but doesn't claim that it "prevents someone kicking it in". It helps to resist forced entry, but doesn't say that it prevents it.
[0]https://www.masterlock.com/products/product/130D
[1]https://www.homedepot.com/p/Masonite-36-in-x-80-in-Premium-6...
Very good points. Nobody can even legally claim Vitamin XYZ prevents cancer/etc even if the lack of it causes such.
Big Lock needs to be taken to task…
> No one would be surprised if you showed that you could cut a hole in pretty much any normal door
The definition of “normal” varies by region. In European cities, it means a pretty heavy door of multiple layers of steel (and pretty unpleasant stuff in the middle) that would probably take 15 minutes of deafeningly loud cutting with a circular saw. I understand the standard for US suburbs is much lower (as it might as well be, given windows exist and the walls aren’t all that sturdy either).
A very long time ago I worked in an office building that had several suites of offices. One of them was a biotechnics company that did things like genetic analysis of farmed fish for selective breeding, massively commercially sensitive stuff. They had a "secure document store" built within their suite, with a thick door made of 19mm ply layers either side of a 6mm steel plate, welded to a full-length hinge, which was in turn welded to a 25mm steel tubing frame, with big long brackets bolted into the brick work of the exterior wall on one side and a steel beam on the other. One key in the possession of the CIO, one in the possession of the CEO. CEO was at a fish farm in Norway. CIO was in the office, getting paperwork out of the safe in the secure room, got a phone call, stepped out of the room to get a better signal, slam <CLICK> <KACHUNK> as six spring-loaded bolts about as thick as your thumb pegged the door shut.
Rude words.
Can't get a locksmith that can pick that particular Ingersoll lock. Can't get a replacement key because the certificate is in the room, and you'd have to drive down to England to get it. Can't jemmy the door open, it's too strong.
Wait.
There's a guy who parks an old Citroën in the car park, I bet he has tools, doesn't he work for that video company downstairs? Let's ask him.
So yeah it took about ten seconds to get in to the secure room. I cut a hatch through the plasterboard with a Stanley knife, recovered the keys, taped the plasterboard back in place, and - the time-consuming bit - positioned their office fridge so no-one could see it.
A swift appointment with an interior decorator was made by a certain C-level exec, and a day or two later there was a cooler with about 25kg of assorted kinds of salmon and a bottle of whisky left in my edit suite.
> They had a "secure document store" built within their suite, with a thick door made of 19mm ply layers either side of a 6mm steel plate, welded to a full-length hinge, which was in turn welded to a 25mm steel tubing frame, with big long brackets bolted into the brick work of the exterior wall on one side and a steel beam on the other.
Wow, that sounds like a pretty secure entry! I wonder how they secured the walls, that’s a lot of steel plate, enough to require structural reinforc—
> So yeah it took about ten seconds to get in to the secure room. I cut a hatch through the plasterboard with a Stanley knife, recovered the keys, taped the plasterboard back in place, and - the time-consuming bit - positioned their office fridge so no-one could see it.
Haha, that was my guess. This is like constructing a safe with a super heavy reinforced steel door on the front and construction paper on the sides and top! He could’ve kicked his way through 5/8” (prolly 16mm to you lot) drywall ;) Your solution was a lot cleaner and you earned that tasty reward!
Hah, I love this sort of story. Recently I was on site and we needed some electrical as-built drawings. They’d been stashed in a tool box, which was locked (and pretty well designed to protect the padlock from bolt cutters / angle grinders). Unfortunately one of the guys had taken the key with him and it was now a two hour plane flight away. They already tried and failed to cut the lock, and were getting an angle grinder to just cut in through the lid (it was ~3mm steel sheet, so hardly impenetrable, but destroying the toolbox would not have been ideal) when I pulled the pin out of the hinge and recovered the drawings that way.
Turns out watching Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t a waste of time after all. ;)
If you hadn't been there to fish them out of the situation, they would have been boned to a scale they weren't prepared to deal with. You deserved the reward for getting them off the hook.
To think I usually gotta go on reddit to fish for puns.
drum_sting.wav
I know it's OT but I wanna know what your old Citroën was. My first car was an S1 BX. Plasticky 80s goodness. I know it's not everybody's idea of a classic (at least in Australia where Citroëns aren't particularly common) but I loved it.
At the time I had a 1989 XM 2.0, but at various times I've had a couple of CXes, several XMs, a couple of GSAs, a BX briefly, and an AX GT.
One of the XMs was the 3-litre 24-valve one which would sit comfortably at twice the legal limit, with the only real difference being the stereo had to be a couple of notches louder and the trees and road signs came up twice as fast. Oh, and the trip computer showed an astounding 8MPG - you wouldn't be doing 147mph for long because you've got less than an hour of fuel in the tank at that speed.
The AX GT was the carby one, basically their 950cc hatchback with the 1.4 out of a BX dropped in and a lumpy cam and twin-choke 2x32mm Weber carb. It was a little pocket-size tin of hooliganism.
The CXes were probably the most refined of the lot. Look up DIRAVI steering - fully powered, no mechanical connection between the steering wheel and road wheels when it's working normally.
Our uncle had a CX when we were kids. When he would visit we loved waiting in the driveway for him to start it so we can watch the air suspension engage and lift the car a good foot up.
Hydropneumatic suspension :-) There's a hydraulic pump about the size of a coffee cup driven off the end of the camshaft, which provides power to the suspension, braking system, and steering.
The suspension has no springs or shock absorbers - there's a "sphere" screwed into the end of each suspension cylinder with a bubble of nitrogen trapped by a rubber sheet that acts as a spring, and a set of spring-loaded valves kind of like the ones in a shock absorber piston to set the damping rate.
For the brakes, the hydraulic pump fed the ABS block through a shuttle valve under the pedal. When you press the pedal it does not move! Or, hardly at all. I takes a little getting used to and the brakes feel really harsh until you realise you don't need to welly it down hard - just gently touch it. The back brakes use pressure from the rear suspension, so they're more effective the heavier the car is.
The steering is amazing. When the engine is running the road wheels and steering wheel are not really connected. There's a linkage through a shuttle valve and when you turn the steering wheel it acts as a servo, with the wheels being moved entirely by hydraulic pressure. The Danfoss valves in normal power steering systems work a bit like this but they use a bendy spring, and the hydraulics only "help".
To make it respond properly at speed there was a heart-shaped cam in the steering box, with a sprung piston pushed into it by hydraulic pressure from a speed governor on the gearbox. The faster you go, the more pressure on the piston, and the harder the spring presses a roller into the cam. At idle with the car stationary you can move the steering wheel and it'll spring back to the middle by itself, and at 70mph you can barely move the steering wheel at all.
It's really sensitive and the first time you drive one you find yourself zig-zagging down the road until you get used to just leaving your fingertips on the rim of the wheel and basically just touching the side you want it to turn to.
They're not terribly fast but you can gobble up the miles surprisingly quickly, and I've never driven anything where you arrived so relaxed.
That is amazing, thank you for this note!
Not OP but my dad drove a CX for a while, but the real treat was our friend's DS.
Ahh, the classic Kool-Aid Man attack.
Right - the quality of your locks matter a lot less if your average 5-year-old tee-baller can through brick through the wind and climb in. One always needs to consider their threat model when considering what security to invest in getting.
Bang on. LPL himself uses a slightly modified Kwikset lock. The modification seizes the lock if someone tries to pick it. I'm the video, he says it isn't to stop all break-ins, but to stop non-destructive break-ins.
So a tamper-evident system not a (particularly) tamper-resistant one.
It's like we forget rocks can easily go through windows.
Bought my teenage son a couple lock picking kits, he's picked almost every single lock we have in our house.
I then picked up a sizable rock, and told him I could get into the house faster than he could. He didn't understand for a few moments, but the lesson was learned.
And if you try to put bars in the window; you'll have a really bad day if your house catches fire!
Same with a moad full of piranhas, it's not fun to fall in by accident :)
Best and cheapest option is a dog, or simply giving up.
Dog is not the cheapest option. The amount of work that goes into taking care of a dog is quite substantial. I know from experience. While many/most people do not mind doing the work/expense, some of us prefer cats because they are a lot less work, among other reasons. I do however admit that cats suck at scaring away intruders.
A large dog is one of the few things that can actually prevent most break-ins.
Story time: There was a serial killer in CA a few decades ago. The police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with dogs, next victim had a small dog. Next the police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with medium or large dogs, next victim had a 30lb dog. Next the police mentioned he doesn't attack homes with large dogs. His next victim didn't have a dog. If its 80+lbs, very few people will mess with them and they will love you forever.
Best and cheapest option is a dog, decent insurance, and off site backups that regularly get restores tested.
And maybe a little bit of not getting too attached to "stuff" - there's very little stuff that's truly irreplaceable. I'd miss my first guitar if my house was robbed and they took it or if my place burnt down. I'd miss the HiFi gear I bought in 1988 and still use, and maybe my modded espresso machine. But I'd get over that loss and my sentimental attraction to those things just fine, especially after I'd replaced then with my insurance settlement.
Most of the world don't construct their homes out of flammable materials, so the risk of the entire place going up in flames is quite low. In some places your home is uninsurable if you dont have burglar bars on all windows.
Regarding dogs: some organophosphate mixed into minced meat and lobbed through your fence/gate/open window is an instant and quiet way to get rid of a dog - personal experience taught me this lesson.
Or "diversify", basically don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Can be done at any scale too, from storing backup copies of important documents at your parents house to buying a few apartments in Indonesia.
Reminds me of high school when people were buying expensive locks for their lockers. These locks, no matter how tough, all still locked onto a flimsy 1.5mm steel hasp that you could bend with your fingers.
The difference here is that cutting a hole in a door is a destructive operation, like applying bolt cutters to a padlock. Lockpicking just operates the lock as designed.
The analogy is probably closer to someone entering your home by pushing the doorframe open so that the door opens without unlocking the lock, or that many automatic doors can be opened by spraying some compressed air through a thin sliver, triggering the internal door sensors. Both are feasible in practice, leave little evidence behind if done well, and do actually surprise a lot of people.
In this case, the right tool is an empty can and scissors