This little guide may save you hundreds of wasted $ buying, expensive crappy locks.
In this video, Mike advises what padlocks to buy for the avid locksporter. Quality ranges with different padlocks on the market, but PickPals has some great suggestions, from practice padlocks to high-security padlocks.
We recommend practice locks; they will give you an understanding of lock picking and are much cheaper than locks you’ll buy from your local hardware shops.
Right. What should your first lock purchase be? You’ve just got into lock sport. You’ve bought yourself your first kit of picks. That’s great. Now, you need something to pick. I’m a massive fan of the Sparrows progressive lock set. Buy that set from Pickpals, guys. If you don’t buy anything else, buy that. It will teach you all the skills that you need. On the other hand, if you go to a hardware shop and buy yourself some cheap padlocks, which is what almost everybody does, they tend to buy a whole bunch of Master Locks, because that’s what’s cheap and available, and the quality is absolute rubbish. Some of them are even these warded things, which don’t even have pins. They are just junk, and you can spend $100 on these things, get yourself a whole bunch, and they are rubbish.
What you need to do is, once you’ve decided that you want to pick some more difficult locks, buy yourself a lock that has a removable core. You can see that this part here is going to come out. You can remove that, and then you can change the pins. You can do all kinds of things with it. You will learn an awful lot more. For my money, the Avis 83 series, you can see that there, 83/whatever, 45, 50, 55, doesn’t matter, are by far the best. That’s the Avis 83 core. That thing is a thing of beauty. If you get yourself a couple of those and some tools, believe me when I tell you, you’ll learn everything you need to know. The first locks you buy should be the progressive lock set. The second locks you buy should be padlocks with removable cores. After that, you’re good to go.
