Weird AuDHD bragging rights: Picked one of these for the first time and ended up having to completely disassemble and reassemble it. I wasn’t ready for it and over-rotated the core, which dropped pins into the lock body and seized the whole thing up.

Not sure how I pulled it off, but the autism and the adhd really came through for me. I’d never taken a padlock apart and I didn’t have a plug follower of the right diameter to take the cylinder apart. So I improvised with a hollow pen tube. I ended up dropping all the key pins (variable-height pins that match up with the key blade) in a pile, and managed to get them all in the correct chambers after a few false starts.

I couldn’t fit a shim in, so I used an allen wrench + tweezers + the hollow pen to put the cylinder back together; it’s basically putting seven tiny metal pieces into spring-loaded chambers that really don’t want tiny metal pieces in them. The padlock itself has two ball bearings that have to fit into the left and right of the chamber and roll all over the place and onto the floor, but I found a way to hold the lock body that kept them both in place long enough to put the lock cylinder back in.

It was a chaotic mess throughout and I shudder to think what any decent locksmith would think of the attempt, but I got it back together again before the anxiety completely seized me up. Now I’m afraid to pick it again, although I also want to take it apart about 50 more times.