Thread by @studentactivism

Lock-picking is a great, wholesome, old-timey hobby to introduce kids to.

https://twitter.com/lollardfish/status/1475175186492186641

So here's the thing about lock-picking. It's fiddly, but not hugely difficult. It's a skill you get better at over time. And it's a real thing—a lot of locks that actual people actually use are pickable by a semi-talented amateur.

A decent set of lock-picking tools only costs like twenty bucks, and again, this isn't a toy—it's real tools you can use for real work.

You can buy transparent locks that let you see what you're doing, and I've meant to get one for years, but you don't need them—you can just pick padlocks that you have lying around. (And starter padlocks with fewer pins can be bought cheap too.)

And another benefit: You turn your kids into the kind of person who interrupts a movie to say "he's not really picking that lock." Which is an awesome kind of person to be, IMHO.

So the way a standard lock and key work is that there are a set of paired cylinders inside. The job of the key is to raise each pair to the exact point where they all meet at the same place, allowing the key to turn the lock. (See illustration.)

If you prod at the inside of such a lock with a piece of bent wire (or a lock-picking tool), you can push a pair of cylinders up, as shown here.

But each pair of cylinders is spring loaded, so they'll slip down as soon as you push them up. UNLESS you use a second tool to twist the lock a bit, as if you were turning it with the key.

When you do that, you put lateral pressure on each of the cylinder pairs, creating a little lip inside the lock. If you're lucky, the top cylinder will catch on that lip when you push on it, lodging in the "unlocked" position.

If you manage to get all the upper cylinders—the pins—of the lock to lodge in that open position, the lever you're using to keep pressure on them will turn just like a key would, and the lock will open.

And that's lock picking. That's all it is. Getting good at it is a matter of getting a feel for the inside of the lock—where to put pressure and how, what order to push up the pins of a specific lock in, that sort of thing. But the principle is really straightforward.

(I'm pretty pleased that each of the first few GIFs I found for "lock picking" in the Twitter interface happened to illustrate a different part of the process.)