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
Typically they’ll have sets of parts that are similar but different. For locks, it usually ends up being having either different sized pins, like you’d find in tumbler door locks, or different holes or notches in a plate as you’d often find in pad locks.
Key notches are generally numbered based on depth, so you could mass produce everything, and then just set up different combinations for different keys. And they do reuses patterns. You can usually find set of ‘keyed alike’ locks in the same box so you can get locks that all use the same key for convenience. So they could do runs of each key and then just distribute them in a way that allows people to find matches, but also not end up with everyone getting the same key.
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