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The South Ord C210.  It’s a 22-piece slim line set and in particular, this is marketed by PickPals as the PickPals 22 piece set.  Now, this is I’m going to say probably my favorite for sort of an everyday carry set of picks.

First of all, yeah it does have a lot of picks in there.  Historically, I’ve not been a fan of sets where there’s like 300 pieces or even 20 pieces, but this one is the exception.  One of the reasons for this is first of all, the case, as you can see, is pretty reasonable in size.  It’s not something where the manufacturer was wanting to show off or pretend that it’s more than it was by putting these things in a huge case.  It really is very, very compact.  There’s a bit of extra room inside to put things that might be interesting.  Let’s take a quick look at this, the 22-piece set.

 

It’s a zippered case.  I really do prefer the zippered cases to any of the sort of leather fold or Velcro type things, it’s just personal preference.  Now, yeah, I’m a big fan of different types of cases and this one is pretty great.  This is a set I’ve actually been using daily for probably two years now.  I’ve had to replace a couple of picks over time, but it was more me being rough with things, but replacements aren’t too pricey so it’s pretty fine.  This has been serving me well for, like I said, a couple of years now.  What’s really great about it is that, unlike a lot of the other sets where there’s a billion picks, there’s not a lot of duplicates in here.  If we take it out and first of all, it’s just great the number of pockets here.  I’ve got one, two, three, and a center pocket that can be used for tension wrenches.  You can keep things a bit organized and place them where it works for you.

 

If we take it out, first of all, any set that boasts a decent number of pieces, what I look for first is tension wrenches.  Now, there are—I don’t need to tell anyone on here, but for anyone who’s been doing this a while, you know that tension is everything.  So having a decent range of tension wrenches for different situations, is really, really important, probably more important than the picks themselves.  So, in this set, we’ve got sprung tension wrenches; two sprung tension wrenches, both different lengths of the full size.  These are good and nice long sprung tension wrench sometimes lets you put—it’s a bit deceptive, the longest sprung tension wrenches are generally better for putting on less force rather than more.  You get a lot more control so you can put just the right amount of force on there and that can be great for sort of really twitchy, high-quality locks.

 

We’ve got the double-ended tension wrench here with the slim and the full size.  Absolutely brilliant if you need to open a padlock or an office locked cabinet or something like that.  A straight up just standard single-ended slim line wrench, a standard wrench with a non-sprung handle and this guy here.  Now, you notice that this, yeah, this looks a bit different.  This is really, really cool.  So in certain situations, you find yourself up against a door, which you need to open, but the door frame is getting in the way.  So what this does is it allows you to put a little bit more distance between your leverage point and the lock in question.  This is really, really useful if you’re out in the real world, you’ve locked yourself out, or if you’re working in the field and you need to open a door, this guy super top notch, especially if you don’t have a plug spinner on hand and you really do need to open it in the unlock direction.  If the lock’s been mounted upside down or something like that, this guy’s going to be a real life saver if you don’t have a plug spinner on hand.

 

That said, I mentioned you can put a little bit extra in this case.  Something I’ve found you can do is this bit in the middle here will fit a plug spinner quite nicely.  You can fit a plug spinner in this case, which makes it really practical and definitely an every day sort of carry kind of set.  If you     want to spend the extra money to throw a plug spinner in there, you’ll be able to open pretty much any of the standard pin tumbler locks, pad locks, whatever out there without too much hassle at all.

 

I’ve got one of these.  This will let you pick double sided locks.  We’ve got pins both on the top and bottom, so this is coming in wafer locks on filing cabinets, certain older cars.  Yeah, where I’ve come up across these is sort of window locks and office cabinets is where I use this guy most of the time, but look, it’s one of those things.  If you don’t have this tool, you can probably pick those types of locks, but it’s going to be really painful and a huge waste of time.  This little bit of metal is so damn useful.  All right, so that’s all the tension wrenches.  Awesome.  Let’s have a look at the pictures and like I said, there’s not a lot of repetition, which is really, really awesome.  We’ll do this side by side because I’ve sort of organized the sides where I keep my things and I don’t want to get them messed up too much, but as you can see is we’ve got a set of picks so if you look through, we have this guy, a city rake.  This is good for the what we called skilled joggling.  You grab it and jiggly it in the lock with some tension and hope for the best and the arrangement of teeth is sort of meant to emulate common key patterns.  Really useful.  To be honest, you can open most things with a city rake in a few seconds.  If that doesn’t work then you go onto using your more sensible picks for more skilled picking.

 

So we’ve got our secular pick here good for double-sided locks.  The, what I call the snowman pick, again, double sided.  Now, we’ve got a couple of hooks, deep, deep hooks, so good when you’ve got those sort of one-nine arrangements on your locks, so very deep set pins versus very shallow set pins.  Absolutely brilliant and a couple of different thicknesses, which cane very, very useful.  To be honest, I don’t mind having a couple of these because, well, when I break a pick, it tends to be those ones.  So that’s just me.  Pretty good, two different sizes of diamonds.  This is—typically, I use the larger diamond when my locks have been jammed up and  want to open it and the smaller diamond when I’m trying to feel around or—either feel or deal with those locks that are a bit tougher, but still smaller and of course a standard rake.  You’re always going to need that.  I’m just going to put this set over here for the moment and let’s have a look and see what I’ve got on the other side.

 

Okay, all right, so I’ve got three different types of funky rakes and four different feeler hook type picks.  I’ve got the two traditional feelers here and these are very, very fine. All the picks in this set are metal handles, so they’ve got a nice, thick metal handle, very, very durable.  I find these better that the plastic handles for the most part.  That’s very, very good.  These are just very, very fine feelers, so they’re good when you’re doing a small lock.  When you want to be able to adequately feel out the interior and do single-pin picking.  These guys are absolutely awesome.  You’ll be able to see one is deeper and wider than the other, so I don’t know how this is going to come out on the video, but these are useful for very different types of locks, so really great.  You can see this guy is one I’ve got bent up slightly.  I use this one very, very frequently.  Then, we’ve got the hook diamond style picks.  Again, really good when you’re trying to wedge or force something open under a deep pin set.  Really good; sorry, one diamond, one rounded, so yeah.  Good for those day pin sets if you’re trying to rack the rear part of the lock and you’ve set the front.  Just brilliant and well, there’s nothing wrong with having a few different rakes.  So with the standard rake and these, we’ve got a few more rakes.  These are just things to try when you’re hoping for the best and trying to get something open.  With those rakes and the city rake, you’re generally going to have a pretty good time.  Not to mention, our brilliant set of tension wrenches.

Just bear with me, I’m going to put these back into the case here.  There we go.  We’ve got those in, these in, and I’m just going to take out my double-sided wrench for a moment while I swap these guys back in.  Here we are.  These ones, yeah, there are some lock pick cases that can be a real chore to get everything back in where you can see with this guy, it’s really just a matter of stuffing it all in there.  There’s enough slack in the leather to allow it all to go in very, very easily.  There we go.  So, that’s it, the Pick Pals 22-piece set.  Really good and you know with Pick Pals, you’ve got great service, great products.  Yeah, Pick Pals just get the job done.  One thing I will continue to support Pick Pals for is that they don’t stock terrible products.  So many other lock picking stores and sites, don’t give a crap about what they stock.  If you look at every single item on Pick Pals, they’re all topnotch.  They’re all things I’d be happy to use myself and the 22-piece set is not exception.

 

 

 

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