Anyone else find cheap padlocks harder than proper ones?

I came up the other way, learning on a no-name laminated padlock from a local hardware store before I ever touched a cutaway, and honestly I think the sloppy ones teach a diferent lesson than they get credit for. The feedback is mushy, yes, but that mush is information. Once I stopped hunting for clean clicks and started paying attention to how the core rolled under tension, the set pins started announcing themselves in a softer way, more like a dip than a click.

My take on your question is that cheap locks are both hard and easy at once. Hard because the loose core lets pins overshoot and drop back, and because sloppy tolerances mean the binding order can wander between attempts. Easy because there are usally no security pins, so if your tension is too heavy and you keep floating past the set pin, backing off to almost nothing fixes half the problem.

What worked for me on those pads was deliberately picking badly for a while. Rake it, overset it, use way too much tension on purpose. You learn where the mush comes from by pushing it around. Then dial back to a feather touch and the lock suddenly behaves. So I woud not call your evening wasted. My gut says the mushiness itself is the teacher here, and the precision locks will feel like a vacation once you go back to them.

I'll take the opposite side of this. I spent nearly three months fighting a laminated padlock from my local shop before someone at a locksport meetup watched me pick for two minutes and said I was teaching myself to guess instead of to feel. He was right. On that lock I coud set the same pin four different ways and never be sure which one actually opened the gate, so I built habits around hunting and jiggling instead of reading the core.

The day I bought a cheap but decent cutaway from Sparrows, everythign I thought I knew fell apart. I could finally see the pins sitting in the plug and feel each one give under the tension wrench. Within two weeks my time on the junk lock dropped from an evening of frustration to about five minutes, because I finally understood what binding actually felt like.

My take is that bad feedback doesn't teach you patience, it teaches you to tolerate confusion. If your practice lock gives clean feedback, you build correct muscle memory first, then the sloppy stuff becomes a calibration exercise instead of a wall. A friend of mine described it like learning to shoot on a rifle with a bent sight. You can hit the target, but you're learning the wrong things to compensate.

So no, I don't think you're making excuses. The laminated stuff genuinely muddies the signal. Get good on something honest, then come back to the cheap one and laugh at it.

This thread makes me feel less dumb about my own junky lock. Mine had a keyhole so tiny my picks kept scraping the sides, and I blamed the lock for weeks before realizing the tool itself was half the problem. Switching to a thinner pick helped more than any technique change did. Does the rubber part on the bottom do anything, or is it just there to stop it scratching stuff? Wondering because maybe that squishy bit is soaking up some of the feel too.

One thing I'd add about the laminated construction specifically: those stacks of stamped plates can flex sideways under tension, so part of the mush you're feeling isn't the pins at all, it's the lock body bending a little. On a machined brass body that force has nowhere to go and gets transmitted straight to your fingers. I also checked two of the same model side by side once and they picked completley differently, wich told me the tolerances vary unit to unit, not just brand to brand. And to the earlier question about the rubber bit, as far as I can tell it's just a scratch guard for furniture, nothing to do with the mechanism.

Still pretty new here so take this with a grain of salt, but I only own a clear acrylic practice lock right now and I've been putting off buying a real padlock because I assumed the cheap stuff would be trivial. Reading this makes me feel better about being stuck at an easy level honestly.

One thing that helped me with mushy feeling locks on my shed's old padlock was switching to top of the keyway tension, or at least I think that's what it's called. Bottom of the keyway kept giving me nothing to read. Is that a thing people do on laminated pads too or is the keyway too cramped for it?

Update: swapped to a thinner pick like one reply suggested and the scraping stopped instantly, huge difference. But the point about the stamped plates flexing sideways is bugging me. If the body itself bends under tension, how do you seperate real binding from that wobble? I clamped it flat against my workbench and everything felt crisper, but I can't pick like that forever. Is lighter tension the whole answer?