Probably one of the most important tips for lock picking. How to hold your tools!
Check out Mike’s tips to get started. Remember, be gentle 🙂
What we’re going to talk about now is how to hold a pick and how to hold a tension wrench. These two topics are incredibly important because you need the absolute amount of control and feedback that you can, and you’re going to hear those two terms time and time again.
First of all, for the pick, you want to be holding it in your dominant hand. I’m right-handed, so it’s how I hold mine. You don’t want to be holding it like that so that all the movement is coming from your wrist. You want to be holding it in your fingers so that the movement is coming from your fingers. The second thing you want to do is make sure that you have got as much of that pick in contact with your hand as you possibly can. The reason for that is that you’re going to have more control that way, and you’re going to get more feedback. You’re going to get feeling back up through the pick. The way I do it is the way most guys do it. Bottom finger is on the bottom of the shaft. The top finger is just on there.
Thumbs holding everything in place, and this bit of the shaft is resting against my hand like that. At that point, you can get into the lock and start manipulating and figure out what’s going on. With the tension wrench, I’m going to assume top of the keyway here for a start. What you want to do is have your index finger on there, and you want your index finger relatively flat. What that does, again, is lets you have more control and more feeling coming back up into that finger. If you’re using bottom of the keyway tension, it is a little bit different. What you’re going to need to do is have that in the bottom there somewhere, but again, you’ve got your index finger and you’ve got it relatively flat, so you’re getting a lot of feedback through there as well. The keys to it again, guys. You have lots of contact with your skin, as much as you can, and you want to be using your fingertips so that you’ve got some sensation there.
