How come Key A can open Lock A. Key B can open Lock B. But not lock A. And key C can open all the locks? Doesn’t that mean A and B should be able to open each other?
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Think of keys as just mechanical representations of a PIN. You can have a user level PIN and then an admin level PIN. Cuts on a key are just physical representations of these PINs and are usually numbered according to how deep the cut is, 0 being the shallowest, 9 being the deepest.
A lock can be set up to accept any number of different PINs as well as a “master” PIN that overrides all others. This can be set across a number of locks so you have a single key that only opens its own lock, and one key that opens all locks in the system.
Usually, what happens is one key is set up to to be the master with one cut that none of the user keys have. All of the rest of the keys are variations of this master. In a system, ALL of the locks accept the master key and will have a variation off this master key.
For example.
Master key: 1,2,3,4,5
Key 1: 3,2,3,4,5
Key 2: 5,2,3,4,5
Key 3: 7,2,3,4,5
Key 4: 9,2,3,4,5
In this case, the 1st number in the key cuts changes. This lock would be set up to allow its own key + the master key. So, from the example above, Lock 4 would be set up to accept 1,2,3,4,5 AND 9,2,3,4,5 using what it called a “master pin” to change the length of the first chamber stack to 1 and 8 for a goal of 9. Key 2 would need a 1 pin and a 4 “master” pin to make it a total of 5, making the lock work on a cut of 1 or 5.
And after all this, we can also have Maison locks (accepts any keys from the system) and shadow keys (that exist in the system but not on a key). And then there are things like Grandmaster and Great Grandmaster keys for much larger systems.
Oh, and a side note, there are no magic “skeleton“ keys that open all locks, and a Master key from one system isnt going to work as a master key on another…
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