Ooops, locked myself out!

The message from "Stewart" contains these words:

From the inside you can usually see the bolt. Saw through it.

You need to attack the bolt where you can see it in the gap between the door & frame. If its a wide gap and an old lock you might be able to saw through it with something like this

Picking a lock is a highly skilled craft!

"Stewart" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@m79g2000cwm.googlegroups.com:

Surely it's better to bite the bullet and call a locksmith - unless someone comes up with a brilliant solution - than to go through all that.

mike

Cutting disk on a 4 inch angle grinder? Should do less damage to the door or frame than chiselling away wood. Or a locksmith.

Remove the handle furniture or escutcheon, and then drill through just above the keyhole/lock with a 13mm drill. Then work a screwdriver into the enlarged hole and jig it around - this will loosen the levers and the bolt can be pushed back.

This will be very hard if the lock is a BS3621 unit.

dg

In my dissolute youth I picked a few internal mortice locks (which I assume were three-lever ones) using a coat hanger with a bit of a hook bent onto its end. I had no skill or understanding of what I was doing, I just wiggled it about a bit until a got a result (I took the same approach in other areas of my life in those days).

Must be worth a go.

It's not a very good idea to chisel away a locksmith.

:-)

Reading that, I think I have to explain what I was doing (vis a vis the locks, not the "other areas").

I lived in a shared house where the heating was included in the rent. The landlord had (very meanly in our opinion) hidden the heating controls behind the locked door down to cellar, and set it to come on for about 30 mins in the morning and a couple of hours in the evening. I picked the lock using said bent coat hanger and switched everything over to 24-hour running. Luxury! We had to leave the windows open some nights it got so hot. The only problem was that he used to call in sometimes on a Saturday morning, so I had to reset the heating and lock everything up again every Friday night.

Thanks god I moved out before he got a gas bill based on a meter reading.

In message , Stewart writes

Call a decent locksmith, a friend of mine is one and he opened a union lock for me in under 2 minutes, scary as a lot of houses have this type of lock on their back doors. He would normally charge £40:00 for this service, including call out.

A second cheaper thought is can you get access to the hinge pins and knock those out and remove the door that way?

Maybe that's where I have been going wrong and why I have so much stuff. I don't think I've ever thrown a key away .. (you never know when they might come in handy / get you out of an 'awkward situation' type of thing). You could have sent them to me to put in my 'key draw' ;-)

All the best ..

T i m

What about the "other areas"?

Enquiring minds need to know...

unless you're an eleven year old girl who's never done it before

The message from "Martin Pentreath" contains these words:

As I was usually in detention at the end of term the teachers discovered that I was useful to have around to remove padlocks from lockers. Most aren't too hard, but as a fallback I had a set of bolt-croppers.

Owain

And you still need a bump key.

Frankly, this isn't news, big or clever. Manual lock rakes have been around for a long time & raking "guns" are widely available and bumping is merely a form of raking.

All this furore does is demonstrate that (i) much locksmithing is "security through obscurity" and (ii) that security through obscurity doesn't work, which we already knew.