Recently moved to a gym that uses padlocks for locking your stuff, they sell them too for an inflated price of 3.5$, jokingly I tried my key on a friend’s lock, and one more random one, of course it didn’t work and it made me curious.
My question is how do factories make all keys/locks different even at these cheap mass produced kinds that are probably sold for 0.5-2$, how is it worth for a factory to “use different patterns” at that price, or how do they do it?
In: Engineering
They don’t. Which inevitably leads to the question of why or better, why aren’t they making them that way instead?
And it’s because the point of a lock is just to make sure that it’s not likely for some other random person that happens to want to rob you would have a key that fits. Which is easy enough to do.
Robbers don’t spend time to go through 1,000 keys to get into your door. Because it only takes a few minutes max to pick a lock, often seconds by someone determined. And most of those locks can be broken with a hammer or wrench pair or another lock. And not only that, but the door is only so strong as well and can be bypassed, so can the window.
So the locks only need to be different enough to discourage attempting to use random keys to open the lock.
If you want security beyond that, you need to step up security measures in many other places first.
Latest Answers