Impressionning

Here is a fine opening technique as effective as it is magical!

To fully understand this method it is better to have assimilated the basics of lockpicking. Indeed impressionning consists in making the key of a lock instead of picking it.And of course, without knowledge of the lock or the variure of his key. This allows in addition to the opening of the lock, to hold the key and therefore to be able to close and reopen it as many times as you want! 

The material:

This practice requires a key blank corresponding to the profile of the lock, a vice clip to hold the blank, a half-round file size Switzerland “2” and a magnifying lamp with 45x magnification.

Manufacturers sell this kit as well as a good number of blanks.

In practice:

The process is simple, once the blank is inserted it will lower the active pins across the hyphenation line, so it is no longer the passive ones that we will try to lower but the active ones that we will raise by filing the blank.

For this it is necessary to associate a rocking movement of the blank with a rotating pressure, so the pins not positioned will produce impressioning from their top a mark on the wire of the blank. It is then enough to file at the location of these marks, but be careful, do not file too deeply under penalty of exceeding the gap line.

When the pins are positioned at the break they will no longer mark.

Here, we can clearly see the impressionned mark in the center of a previously filed location:

And now, it is by repeating this somewhat mathematical operation that we are guaranteed to obtain the opening!

In addition to having the key! Here, the original next to the one obtained using the impressionning technique:

To go further:

For an entry-level cylinder like here, this impression took 2 minutes, but on other systems you have to adapt; This complementary video, made during one of our conferences, clarifies some points and indicates some references:

You can watch the first video here

(ACF members: log in to watch the video)

Many other methods exist and depending on the toys they will be more or less recommended, a variant of this practice is “auto-impressionning”.

Practicable on various systems, impressionning is more slowly than lockpicking, yet it is a very effective technique that contains some subtleties so get started and it will open!