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
Some key/lock manufacturers guarantee that your lock is the only individual that uses that exact key.
Others guarantee that you are alone with it in your country.
Some keys are so easy to copy that it makes no difference that the keys are unique.
With cheap pad-locks, there is usually a rotation of a given number or combinations that recur at regular intervals. Every 1000 locks. Every 10 000 locks. Or in a bad scenario, every 20 locks.
If you want all of the keys, you can literally purchase a shipping pallet with those locks in retail packaging and extract all the keys.
This is unfortunately also true for car doors. Car manufacturers also use rotations of keys with a given number of combinations. Not necessarily that high a number. (nowadays, thankfully, the car requires a *immobiliser chip* in the key that communicates the keys electronic identity to the car when you turn the ignition; it’s enough to get into the car, but not enough to drive off with it.)
The answer to your question is more or less that it’s worth to have different patterns because it’s a cost of doing business. If you buy five padlocks, no matter how cheap, you expect them to have five different keys. Else you feel cheated on and want to return them all. They HAVE TO have rotation, the question is just how many unique combinations they are rotating.
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