Your first picks arrived in the mail - here's what I wish I'd known

Oct 21, 2026 Last reply: 2 days ago 3 Replies
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Seeing that package on the doorstep never gets old. Before you tear into it and start raking everything in the house, slow down a minute. Sort your picks by thickness first. The .025 stuff is what most people should learn on, the thinner .020 bends if you get heavy-handed, and the thicker .040-ish ones are mostly for padlocks with sloppy keyways. Pick one hook pick and one standard tension wrench and put the rest back in the pouch. You don't need fifteen tools right now.



Then get a cheap padlock you don't care about and start with single pin picking, not raking. Raking feels like magic when it works but it teaches you nothing. Set one pin at a time, listen for the click, go slow. I spent my first month raking everything and it stalled my progress badly. When I finally forced myself to go pin by pin on a Master #3, everything clicked within a week. Two habits worth building early. Keep your tension feather-light, like barely holding a paperclip, because heavy tension is why most beginners think a lock is 'picked' when relly they've overset a pin. And keep a little notebook of what worked. Sounds dorky, but writing down 'hook, bottom of keyway, medium tension' after a successful open builds your feel way faster than random flailing.



Last thing, only pick locks you own. Actual door locks on your house count as fair game, but a neighbor's shed or anything in a commercial building will get you in real trouble. Stick to padlocks and practice locks and you'll have years of fun ahead.


I found that the progression of picking smaller locks is really just a matter of patience. I started with cheap novelty padlocks, but even those felt wrong til I got comfortable with the tension application. I used a standard wrench and found that a tiny fraction of force made all the difference. I was mostly focusing on the brass on a Kwikset style practice lock, which is slightly diferent from the wafer style I initially tried.

Moving away from the single pin concept, I decided to spend more time mastering the subtle feedback. Instead of just listening for the click, I started trying to feel the slight movement in the tension tool as I moved the pin. It takes a while to train your fingers to perceive that minuscule shift in resistance. I prefer using the hook on the bottom of the keyway beacuse it gives the most contact surface for these types of locks.

I also learned quickly that forcing the tension too much, even for a split second, can actually set the internal spring instead of the pins. That was a mistake I made early on. It is better to spend an extra five minutes on one lock than to rush through twenty.

Totally agree about focusing on the subtle feedback when you’re working on those brass cylinders. It takes time to get used to feeling that tiny resistance shift instead of just hearing the click. I found that when I first started trying to isolate the pins, using a hook with a very fine point made it much easier to pinpoint exactly where the tip was landing in the keyway. It felt like it reduced the surface area for the tension, wich really helped me train my fingers to notice those individual pin movements.

I'm having trouble knowing which path to take first. I keep seeing these recommendations for starting on specific practice locks, but I mostly have old cabinet locks lying around from house projects and they don't seem to fit the description of single pin practice locks at all. It's frustrating trying to tell if I need to learn a totally different set of skills for those mechanisms. I'm worried I'm wasting time trying to apply a padlock method to something completly different.

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