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
Let’s just talk home door locks. There are 2 main keyway used in the USA, Kwikset and Schlege(?). Kwikset generally use 5 pinned locks with 6 different types of cuts. Schlege uses 5 or 6 pin locks with 9 different cut lengths. So doing the math, roughly every 1 in 8000 kwikset keys are the same and 1 in every 59,000 or 530,000 (depending if 5 or 6 pin) schlege keys are the same.
Anyone with an RV knows what a CH751 is. Not all keys are different. There are many of the same key used over and over.
Statistics and probability were still largely unsophisticated science in the 1960s. General Motors, at that time that biggest car company in the world decided that for their Chevrolet line of cars – the VERY most popular cars – they would need only 36 discrete key patterns.
They were wrong, and a lot of people drove off in someone else’s car that year.
I once mistakenly entered in another person’s car with my own key. The car looked liked mine and only after I entered it I realized that’s not my car. I went out and locked it, unlocked and locked again to be sure what just happened.
Fun fact. There’s many police cars that use the same key. It’s not really restricted and most people can get this key with some effort.
Hell there’s probably less than a dozen different keys that can unlock way more things than you would expect.
They don’t, they have batches. When we bought our house and got new locks, there was a code on the package. Say it was 33453. So we spent a good 10 minutes rooting through all the lock packages so we got 3 for our doors so all the keys matched.
It’s totally possible that Joe down the road has the same lock as us, but we’re not going to try to get into each other’s houses. But there’s enough variety that it makes it so John can’t just walk around with a key and get into a random house. Also John’s probably just gonna kick the door in or break a window anyway.
This has nothing to do with your post but please for the love of god: the dollar sign goes in front of the numbers, not at the end.
So $2 instead of 2$. Or $3.50 for three dollars and fifty cents.
I don’t know where on the internet or our education system this cropped up, but please fix it.
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