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
If you have 5 different positions to consider on a key, each of which can have 6 different meaningful lengths, that producess 15625 possible combinations. That’s not many, and that’s for a key that’s supposedly fairly secure and widely used for house security.
For a house you can improve that security by having two locks on each entry way, which would mean that you’d have over 100 000 000 combinations, even if they’re from the same manufacturer/same standard. That’s much better.
For gym lockers and the like (and bike locks) all a lock is doing is stopping someone quickly and idly opening your locker without fiddling with it and *hopefully* someone noticing they’re trying to break or bypass the lock.
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