One of this year’s highlights for me was winning the impressioning championships at LockCon. I promise this will be the last posting about this topic, and the only reason to bring it up again is because SSDeV president Steffen Wernéry kept his promise: he edited (and made publicly available) a high quality video about the impressioning games in Sneek.
In this video you can see what it looks like when someone files a key to a lock without knowing what the original key looks like, and create a working key (from scratch) to a lock in minutes. For those who do not know how lock impressioning works here is a quick explanation: a blank key is inserted into the lock, and turning pressure is applied. This turning pressure creates pins to bind into the lock. By wiggling the key up and down when it’s under this turning pressure, the binding pins will make a small scratch into the blank. Once the scratches are identified, a few strokes with a fine file will take away some metal on the key, causing the pins to drop a little deeper into the key. The interesting thing is that pins will stop making marks/scratches when they are at the correct position. The process of twisting and filing is repeated until the pins no longer leave marks (and the lock opens).
Currently two versions of the video are available: one in Quicktime MP4 (230 MB) and one in Windows Media format (320 MB).
Looking back at the video I can only smile. I was under quite some pressure, and I did get a little nervous by the camera at first. Fortunately I could block that feeling quite fast and focus on opening the lock. Hearing me yell ‘open!’ on the video still gets a grin on my face.
I would like to thank Steffen for his hard work of editing the video and make it available in such short time frame. And I can only hope you enjoy the video as much as I do. Hopefully it will get you interested in learning about opening locks this way or give you an idea what impressioning is about and what our games look like ….
