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
Sometimes they have a remarkably small set of unique keys or combinations. Three personal stories in order of scariness (**one with nuclear war implications**)
When I was in high school, I went to the right locker in the wrong bank of lockers (i.e. not my actual school locker) and my combination opened the locker. When I saw the contents didn’t match what I expected, I closed it and got out of there, just in case someone would think I was trying to get into someone else’s locker. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence it worked, or if every bank of lockers had the same pattern of combinations.
I do know that most inexpensive combination locks have enough “slop” that there are not really that many unique combinations.
When I was stationed in upstate NY in the early 80’s, I went to the wrong car in the mall parking lot and used my key on a car that looked like mine. I was able to unlock the car and only when i got in did I realized this wasn’t my car. I don’t recall the model, but the car was a GM.
Again, while stationed in upstate NY (Griffiss AFB), a co-worker discovered that his dormitory room key was the master key for our work-center and the next door Command Post (i.e. the people who would relay message for the B-52s to go and kill 40 million people). When his key was inserted in the command post lock, the entire cylinder would come out and a screw driver could be inserted and unlock the door. We were supposed to be “buzzed” in, but he was able to walk in and nobody noticed.
I was able to convince him to “accidentally” discover this on our work-shop and turn the key in. Had a bad guy had that key, he could have taken over the command post and prevented the flying of B-52’s if a war order had come in.
**tl;dr school lockers, car locks, and key to nuclear command post issues.**
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