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by Animats 39 days ago
Right. Several of those use stacks of little discs instead of balls. More compact, but if one of those discs gets turned sideways, the lock is jammed.

Pick-resistant locks have two known problems. First, if they have to fit inside a traditional lock cylinder space, the options are very limited. If you're willing to have a bigger lock body, pick resistance isn't as hard.

The second is more subtle. Pin-tumbler locks, as they wear, become easier to open. The pins wear and become rounded. Pick resistance decreases, but you don't get locked out. Some high-security designs fail in the direction of staying locked, even with a valid key. So either you have angry customers locked out, or everything has to be made in stainless steel with high precision at high cost. (That's Abloy.)

1 comments

I broadly agree those are good to consider (a typical requirement for my own designs is to fit the KIK format as-is), but I think you're being a little too absolute. Enclave deserves some recognition here for getting pretty close. It's just a sidebar and a cam, totally normal lock components. The simpler cylinder-in-cylinder designs are also mostly just hardware that multi-shearline locks already have for master keying.