Enter As You Please: Rock’a Lock’a Bang! Bang!

[ enter (verb): to come or go into ]

RECOIL Magazine has never been just about guns. We believe in well-rounded, self-reliant, and capable individuals, as well as the importance of building foundational skill sets. One of those key skill sets for the well-rounded gentleperson is the ability to gain entry to places and things, even if they’re secured. 

Perhaps noisily and overtly, but even better quietly and covertly.

When you think about what might deny you entry to something, the first thing that probably comes to mind are locks. Locks on doors, locks on containers, locks on vehicles — there’s locks everywhere in modern society. Imagine ancient times; to really secure a structure or belongings, you’d need to post guards.

The first example of a lock dates way back to 4,000 B.C. In the ruins of the city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia (today, Iraq) was a rudimentary pin-tumbler lock made of wood. Mankind is nothing if not resourceful, and over the centuries since, we moved on to metal construction, keyed and keyless locks, and now electronically actuated locks. With these advances, physical security has become — at least potentially if not always in practice — both more convenient and more secure.

But for any protections that we invent, we also figure out ways to defeat them. If you’re a first responder, getting through a locked door could be the difference between life and death, and you may or may not be concerned with breaking things. In regular everyday life, you might forget or lose a key and could save time and money by solving the problem yourself. 

During a period of civil unrest, you might be stranded and desperately need to quietly obtain shelter and security. 

On one hand, you can go caveman style and smash like Hulk. On the other hand, you may wish to be more discreet or not cause irreversible damage. Companies like Sparrows Lockpicks have specialized in providing tools, know-how, and training gear for defeating locks.

Well, Sparrows stepped things up, putting together a unique, now-annual multiday event/conference they call Rock’a Lock’a Bang! Bang! It covered topics such as lockpicking, safe cracking, impressioning, mechanical and shotgun breaching, shooting and CQB tactics, escape and evasion, and much more. Instructors and speakers boasted impressive credentials, including top-tier competitive lockpickers. 

Attendees were no slouches themselves, with a heavy contingent of enthusiasts, working locksmiths, and professionals in physical and cyber security, including well-known red team specialists. One of the attendees worked for a federal agency, and others flew in from as far away as the Netherlands and Singapore.

We attended the second Rock’a Lock’a Bang! Bang!, which took place this fall on the grounds of the decommissioned Nevada State Prison in Carson City, Nevada. Needless to say, it was quite an experience in a wholly immersive environment.

LOCKPICKING

Lockpicking refers to opening a lock without its key. Typically, you’d use special tools, such as lockpicks of varying types and tension wrenches. Using your tools, you manipulate the internals of a lock, like their pins or wafers, to unlock it. Lockpicking is both an art and science.

While there are many types of lock designs, pin and tumbler locks are the most common — cylindrical locks with a series of stacked pins of different lengths. 

When you insert the correct key, the pins are lifted to specific heights, thus lining up all the lower pins. This is called the shear line; with everything aligned, you can rotate the cylinder and open the lock.

To pick a basic pin and tumbler lock, insert a tension wrench in the keyway to apply torque while you work on each pin with a pick. That tension keeps pins that you successfully picked in place until you have them all and can open the lock. Some locks can be raked or bumped open very quickly; some can be easily opened by dedicated bypass tools.

There are also different lock types, like wafer and disc detainer locks. The former are similar to pin tumbler locks, except they use flat wafers rather than pins. The latter contains a stack of rotating discs with gates that must be aligned, allowing a sidebar to drop into the slot and unlock the lock.

Lock manufacturers can add more mechanisms to make locks harder to pick, such as security pins, check pins, sidebars, pins inside of pins, pins that lift and rotate, false gates, tighter tolerances, and so on. Given enough time, expertise, and specialized tools, even the most complex and difficult locks can be defeated — but they sure can act as great deterrents. 

Our training group at Rock’a Lock’a was filled with skilled lockpickers, so our instructors went straight to more complex locks and advanced topics. The ingenuity of lock designers, as well as those looking to outsmart them, is fascinating. Some locks have check pins; we learned to use a thin hook to push them out of the way. Some locks have secondary shear lines that are difficult to defeat without specialized tools. 

Institutional locks for use in facilities are often designed for master keys; they have two shear lines, so two keys can operate the same lock. The more master wafers in a lock, the easier it can be to pick. If you have access to service and modify a lock, you could add a ton of master wafers to it, making it vulnerable to almost any key. 

Regular users would be none the wiser because their original key would continue to work normally.

As you’re learning, clear and cut-away practice locks are helpful to understand concepts and techniques, to see what your tools are doing to the pins, and to directly associate what’s actually happening with what you feel through your tools.

Beginners would be well served with lockpick sets such as the Tuxedo or Vorax from Sparrows. The EOD Full is a great choice for first responders or military needing a compact kit for work.

IMPRESSIONING

Another method of opening a lock is called impressioning — starting with a key blank, inserting it into the lock and working it back and forth, looking for marks where pins contact the blank, carefully filing it down, and repeating until it sufficiently resembles the actual key to open the lock.

This requires time, experience, and finesse; those who are very good at it can make some good time, but it’s a slow and deliberate process for the rest of us. The notable benefit if you’re successful is that you’ll end up with a working key as a reward for all your hard work. One of our instructors, for example, impressioned a key for a gear shift lock on a vintage Porsche for which the original key had been lost long ago.

Impressioning is difficult, and in our group of 15 or so, only a few were ultimately successful over the course of about an hour. You might go through two or more key blanks. It helps to have bright lighting, a magnifier, an impressioning handle, a bench vise, and a set of good files. Tiny metal shavings will be everywhere, so keep your hands away from your face and eyes. Despite the frustration of failure, the process was oddly meditative.

SAFE CRACKING

Safes provide physical security via a combination of a robust container and a secure lock — often a combination dial or electronic lock. As you’d expect, this can make them quite difficult to open, especially if you’re dealing with thick steel and high security locks. Safe expert Wayne Winton walked us through the concepts behind manipulating safe locks (i.e., picking the combination) as well as physically attacking them.

Combination locks have a cam attached to a spindle with a lever riding on its perimeter. Behind the cam are wheels, three of them in the case of a three-digit combination. Each wheel has a cut-out; successively dialing in the correct combination aligns all of the gates, allowing a fence to drop down and the lever to fall into the cam’s notch. 

Then, you can open the lock. 

Sparrows’s Challenge Vault features a configurable safe combination lock that you can use to practice safe cracking, with several levers to switch between two- and three-number combos to make for progressive practice sessions. 

Winton walked us through the tedious process, by which you systematically turn the dial to each position, feeling for resistance so that you can graph them all out and find clues to where the gates are. 

That resistance comes from contact points between the nose of the lever and the cam drive. Isolate the first and second wheel to graph them out. Then, brute force the last wheel to find the last number in the combination. It’s harder and more frustrating than it sounds, and it already sounds hard. Even with the practice vault, we’d find false positives for the spots of resistance. Actual safe locks could have light spring tension that’s even harder to detect.

Physically opening locked safes often involves drilling a small hole to gain access to the locking mechanisms. But how do you know where to drill? You can make a real mess if you drill in the wrong spot, such as into the wheel packs. Many safes have relockers to lock up the bolt work as a fail-safe against tampering; it may have already fired. Or your own attempts could also trigger a relocker. 

Then, you’ll need to retract it, in addition to defeat the primary lock. Those who do this on a regular basis have databases of details on various models of safes and locks, just like a dope book for shooting, so they can determine the best spots to drill. Endoscope-style cameras give you eyes on the interior. 

Our group worked as a team to drill some safes, eating through bits. We only knew where to drill because we could examine the inside of the safe door and take measurements. We were even able to defeat a relocker just as everyone had left for lunch. It was a blast, but we wouldn’t categorize safe cracking as a realistic DIY endeavor for most people.

BREACHING

Speaking of destructive techniques, we also touched on mechanical and ballistic breaching. 

TNT Rescue brought out examples of battery-powered spreaders, cutters, and rams, which conveniently run off common 18- and 20-volt tool batteries. We used them to pop open doors like they were made of balsa wood, as well as cut through and peel open car doors and pillars like soup cans. We don’t expect anyone would have these monstrosities at home, but it was great fun and very educational to put them to work. 

Good old-fashioned battering rams are a little more within reach. With a little (actually a lot) more elbow grease, they got the job done while letting you release some pent-up aggression. 

Ballistic breaching is another common method for tactical teams to make entry, utilizing shotguns with specialized breaching rounds to defeat locking mechanisms and hinges. 

Royal Arms brought their breaching system to the range for us to try. The key is combining frangible breaching ammo, a shotgun with a breaching stand-off device, and good technique. The ammo is composed of a compressed copper or copper and steel frangible slug in various weights to suit the type of door you need to breach. The stand-off device directs energy on target while venting pressure and deflecting debris. It also bites into the door for quick, secure, and accurate placement on target. 

Proper technique is also critical to ensure your safety while being as effective as possible. You need to select the appropriate ammo for the material you’re facing (e.g., hollow wood, solid wood, metal). The lock set is typically the weakest link, so target it. Envision the plunger in 3D space and aim at it. Make sure the frame will capture the energy and orient the shotgun at a 45-degree angle, while ensuring your body is positioned out of the fatal funnel. There’s a lot of moving pieces to keep straight, especially in a real-life situation with active threats on the other side of the threshold. Royal Arms gave a great primer on what you’d be dealing with.

LOOSE ROUNDS

There was much more at Rock’a Lock’a Bang! Bang!, such as escape and evasion, a range day, CQB, night vision, first aid, prison tattoos, and great presentations from subject matter experts about negotiation techniques and intellectual property. Not to mention a final force-on-force exercise in the prison with role players and locks to contend with, as well as an optional SERE experience for a small group of attendees willing to sign a bunch of waivers with notes from their doctors in hand.

As with most limited-duration training experiences, Rock’a Lock’a covered and sampled a lot of topics but couldn’t fully ingrain new skills in attendees — that takes more time. But the instructors were able to impart a lot of new information to people of varying skill levels and help everyone determine what they needed or wanted to continue working on or learn more about. They gave us resources and frameworks to self-diagnose and practice on our own, moving forth on our own journeys to improve and grow. 

And Sparrows did a great job making the event a truly social and immersive experience, with enjoyable activities that also served as bonding experiences. It was a large group of pretty like-minded but diverse people, many of them experts in their own fields. This was true edutainment — learning and having a blast at the same time.

So into the rabbit hole we all go, with a new group of friends.

Why you can trust RECOIL

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Since our founding in 2012, RECOIL remains the premier firearms lifestyle publication for the modern shooting enthusiast. We deliver cutting-edge coverage of guns, gear, accessories and technology. We go beyond basic reviews, providing no B.S. buyer’s guides, hands-on testing and expert analysis on everything from firearms and survival equipment to watches and vehicles. 

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