The VICE Guide to Lockpicking
· Vice
This guide is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
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Storage units. Police cars. Houses. Picnic hampers. What do they all have in common? Sometimes being locked when you want to get into them and don’t have a key, of course! VICE spoke to a friendly local lock-picking enthusiast to get the lowdown on picking locks.
PICKING ‘BASIC’ LOCKS
For basic locks, you’re going to need two little tools called a rake (not a garden rake) and a tension wrench (not a regular-sized wrench). A rake is the tool us lockpicks use to mimic the teeth of a regular door key, while the tension wrench mimics the motion of the key turning in the lock. Together, you have a pair of tools that can open most basic locks. Place the wrench in the keyway and apply gentle pressure, similar to how you’d lightly turn a key. Then, insert the rake and move it across the pins inside the lock, while adjusting the pressure on the tensioning tool. If the lock isn’t turning, changing the angle of the rake can sometimes help.
THE MASTER LOCK 140
If you include all the clones of it produced by other companies, the Master Lock 140 is—based on my experience and travels—one of the most common padlocks in North America. Unfortunately, Master Lock’s engineering team was thinking about quantity over quality here, and the vast majority can be opened with what’s called a “comb pick:” a tool for bypassing locks that lifts all of their pins at once, pushing them up into their respective chambers above the shear line. (The shear line is the threshold that all of the pins in a lock must line up at to allow the key to turn.) It’s a running joke in the lockpicking community that having a 4-pin comb pick is like having a master key for the Master Lock 140. Honestly, it has us in stitches.
UNLOCKING POLICE CARS
While it looks like any other Ford key, this is a universal key of sorts to a bunch of old police cars. Produced from the mid 1990s until 2011, the infamous Ford P71 Police Interceptor Crown Victoria may have been nicknamed “the car you couldn’t kill” but you could very much break into it. A TON of them were keyed alike, using the 1284x key code as standard. The problem is, the type of key blank that the 1284x code is cut onto (the H75) is readily available in hardware stores everywhere, meaning copies are pretty effortless to acquire. You can even find these keys on Amazon now. (Side note: often when police cars are removed from service, they begin new lives as cabs, meaning these keys aren’t strictly limited to law-enforcement vehicles.)
STEERING WHEEL LOCKS
Steering wheel locks sucked in the ‘90s and they suck now. With the introduction of anti-theft systems, they quietly faded into obsolescence, but more people are buying them again now because of the antics of the KIA Boyz. Problem is, most use the same outdated mechanism they did when they first came out: a ratchet and pawl secures the whole thing to the steering wheel. Well, a thin piece of steel makes short work of that; a section of tape measure works best, as the curve conforms to the cylindrical locking bar. Insert a section until you feel it stop against the pawl, apply pressure while trying to extend the locking bar further, and the tape measure should slide under the pawl. Hey presto, the locking mechanism has been bypassed.
TRAILER LOCKS
Similar to the steering wheel locks, almost all the locks on trailers use a ratcheting locking pawl to secure the shackle to the body of the lock. All you need is something thin enough to fit between the body and shackle to manually depress it—I recommend using what’s referred to as a “knife tool.” The construction quality on these is generally so unbelievably bad that you can actually see the pawl, making bypassing it that much easier. Once you’ve located it, maneuver your knife tool in, then depress and hold to allow shackle removal.
THE THING WITH ‘AMERICAN LOCK’
American Locks are pick resistant: they often feature both serrated and spool style anti-pick security pins in their locks. These can frustrate and slow down even an experienced picker. That said, security pins only matter if the rest of the lock is properly protected. On many older American Lock models, the operating mechanism at the back of the lock cylinder is left exposed and can be manipulated using a tool called a “bypass driver.” Using this, a large number of these older locks can be opened quickly and easily, without ever touching the pins. American Lock eventually “patched” the issue with a steel plate that closes off the back of the lock cylinder, but to this day, I still see some of their padlocks shipped without it.
Find Nicolas online @lockpicnic
This guide is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
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