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
For the lock side, they have a handful of pins of different lengths, and you change which length you put in which location. Cutting the keys is relatively easy to automate, as there’s a defined depth of cut for each location.
It’s also possible they make hundreds or thousands of locks with the same key, then switch to a different key each shift, mixing locks from different production runs when they ship them out.
There are also factories that always use the same key, for example CH751.
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