Defeated! Picking Works By Design's Unpickable Lock

ELI5/TLDR

A YouTuber sent Lock Noob a one-of-three handmade “unpickable” lock to defeat. The lock’s trick: the key splits into two pieces, so once you start turning it, the keyway rotates away and nothing can reach the pins. Lock Noob skipped the normal picking tools and used a centuries-old technique called impressioning — jam in a blank, jiggle it, look for the tiny dimples the pins press into the metal, file them down, repeat. After two-plus stressful hours and one slightly damaged plastic pin, the lock popped open.

The Full Story

What makes the lock “unpickable”

In a normal pin tumbler lock, a key does two jobs at once. The cuts on its blade push the spring-loaded pins inside the lock up to the right heights. The handle end of the key — the bow — then turns the whole assembly to throw the bolt. A picker exploits this: poke tools through the keyway, wiggle pins to the right heights, apply turning pressure, win.

Works By Design’s lock, called the MPX, separates the two jobs. The blade goes in first as a passive sliver of metal. The bow is a separate cog-driven handle that, once you turn it, rotates the blade into the pins from outside the keyway. Artichoke 2000, another lockpicker, calls this a “traveling key system.”

As the keyway rotates away, any lock picker attempting to pick the lock will find that their access to the keyway and therefore the pins will be closed off to them.

So the moment you try to apply turning pressure, the channel a pick would sit in disappears. Add an anti-bump feature — defeating the trick where you whack the back of a lock to bounce the pins into the open position — and the standard toolkit is dead.

The elephant in the room

The lock arrived sealed with a tamper-proof case containing the real key. Lock Noob spent a couple of disarmingly honest minutes explaining that he could absolutely peek if he wanted to. Plastic case, bright torch, you can read the bitting through the back. Solvent under an anti-tamper seal lifts it cleanly. He shows the audience both methods, then resigns himself to using the key only once — under a cloth, blind — to verify he can open the lock and rescue it if his attack damages a plastic pin inside.

The reason for the rescue: one of the six key pins is plastic. If impressioning bends or fractures it, the lock could jam permanently, even against the real key. So he opens it once with the real key, dumps out the internal locking pieces so the shackle can be removed in an emergency, reseals the case with tape, scribbles over the seal, and never looks again.

Three plans of attack

Three techniques in theory could work against a lock whose keyway disappears.

Key impressioning. Insert a blank — an uncut key — turn hard, jiggle. Pins that are binding (resisting the turn) press into the soft brass blank and leave a small dimple. File that dimple down a hair. Re-insert. Look for the next dimple. Repeat until the blank, slowly chewed down, becomes a working key. It is craftsmanship, not cleverness. The patience of a watchmaker.

Foil impressioning. A variant. Wrap soft foil over a skeletonized blank and let the binding pins push themselves into the foil as you rock the key. When all pins have pressed to their correct depth, the lock opens. The foil ends up looking like the real key.

Reverse picking. A wilder idea Lock Noob considered but abandoned. Carve a key blank out of expanded polystyrene that overlifts every pin at once. Apply huge turning force. Then flood the lock with acetone to dissolve the foam, and very slowly release the torque so the pins drop one by one into place. Beautiful in theory. Useless in practice, because the cog mechanism doesn’t allow the fine torque control it would need.

The plastic pin problem

That one plastic pin is doing more work than it looks. Brass dimples on a brass blank are visible under magnification. Plastic on brass leaves nothing. So if the plastic pin happens to bind first — which it might, because impressioning depends on the binding order — the picker is blind and has no idea where to file.

Worse, plastic deforms under torque. Push hard enough to make the next pin bind, and the plastic pin can squish, crack, or shear.

A lot of this lock impressioning sort of depends on the binding order. Now the good news is plastic is deformable. So if it does bind first, it’s possible that I can sort of torque the lock to the point where I’m sort of squishing that plastic pin and I can see the marks of the next binding pin. But that will put strain on the plastic pin and could damage it.

He decides to push through anyway. He clamps the lock in a vice, builds a brass adapter so an electric screwdriver can spin the cogs without chewing up the lock’s hardware, and gets to work.

The grind

Two hours. The cycle is monotonous: load the blank, spin the cogs, pull the blank, hold it under a magnifying lamp, hunt for new dimples, file. He learns which pins are deep cuts (still marking after many rounds) and which never mark at all. One pin — position three — never produces a dimple. Probably the plastic pin. He files everywhere else.

He hits a wall. The cuts on his blank look deep. Deeper than the deepest groove he can imagine. The lock won’t turn. He’s nervous he has destroyed the plastic pin. He takes a break — genuinely stressed, on camera — and comes back with a fresh idea: a pin depth card sent by Works By Design that shows there’s a still-deeper cut available. So he files some more.

Don’t often get stressed out by locks, but this one is — oh, no way. Yes. That felt really gritty, though. But that that was a turn. That was a turn.

It opens. The turn is rough, gritty, like grinding sand through a gear, but it opens. He locks the shackle back on with the impressioned key and confirms it still works.

Inspecting the carnage

He guts the lock to see what survived. Inside: standard spool pins (a security feature designed to fool pickers but useless against impressioning), one T-pin (another anti-picking shape), and the plastic pin, which has had a small chunk sheared off its tip.

That’s a good example of why you don’t use plastic pins in a lock.

The plastic pin survived enough that the real key still works, but barely. Lock Noob swaps in a fresh plastic pin from a spare set the maker had thoughtfully included.

Foil impressioning, attempted

He still wants to try the foil method, for fun and on principle. Three hours of filing produces a “skeletonized” key — most of the blade hollowed out, just a thin frame left. He wraps it in foil, slides it into the keyway, rocks it back and forth, and waits.

The foil shows clear pin impressions. But the lock does not open. He works out why mid-attempt: where the keyway begins, the inside has a small angled lip. As the blade rotates into the pin chambers, the pins drop onto this ledge before they reach the foil. Any pin that needs to sit higher than the ledge can never push deep enough into the foil. The angle, designed for the mechanism, accidentally defeats foil impressioning entirely.

Just because of this angle, this slope, it actually foils foil impressioning. I don’t know the way around that, actually.

He concedes defeat on this technique. Says it would take him months to think around it.

Key Takeaways

The lock’s defense was elegant: separate the lifting from the turning. The MPX makes the keyway physically inaccessible the moment torque is applied. This nullifies the entire pick-and-tension family of attacks.
Impressioning is the underappreciated picking technique. It doesn’t need keyway access during turning — it just needs a blank, time, and the ability to read tiny marks on metal. A traveling-key design doesn’t protect against it.
Plastic pins are clever but fragile. They block impressioning’s feedback loop (no marks on the blank) but can shear under torque, potentially bricking the lock for the real key too.
A small geometric detail can kill a whole attack class. The angled lip at the keyway entrance, almost certainly there for mechanical reasons, made foil impressioning impossible. Defensive accidents matter as much as defensive design.
The maker’s response is humble. Works By Design isn’t disappointed the lock fell. He notes that swapping in torpedo-style key pins would defeat impressioning too, and the lock is closer to truly secure than not.

Claude’s Take

This is a good example of what a craft channel looks like when the host actually respects the audience. Lock Noob spends the first five minutes confessing every way he could cheat — chemicals on the seal, torch through the case, disassembling the lock — and pre-emptively neutralizes them so the eventual win is honest. That kind of transparency is rare and worth a point or two by itself.

The technical substance is also surprisingly rich. Three named techniques, each with a clear mechanical rationale for why it might or might not work, and one ad-hoc geometric discovery (the angled lip) that explains a failure. The “plastic pin solves one problem but creates another” thread is a small masterclass in how defenses interact.

The pacing has the only real weakness. The two-hour impressioning session is compressed but still drags, and the foil attempt feels tacked on after the climax. A shorter, two-attempt structure might have been crisper. But the trade-off is honesty — you get to feel the slog.

Score: 8/10. Solid niche-craft content with educational density well above the average lockpicking video, and a host whose code of conduct is the actual point.