Steel Bolt Hacking is a lock picking book for those that want to learn the art of picking locks as a hobby. With such annual events as DefCon, the annual hackers convention, more and more computer people are becoming interested in learning lock picking. Lock picking sports groups are springing up all over the world with little or no books to support it. Typically the art of lock picking is passed down from locksmith to apprentice and rarely are there any material to help those interested in lock picking, that don’t necessarily want to become a locksmith to learn it. Steel Bolt Hacking will teach you more than just the basics, you will learn to pick padlocks, deadbolts, push button combination locks, and how find the number on combination padlocks.

5 Responses to “Steel Bolt Hacking (Lock Picking )”

1. Fjodor Puré says:

   September 9, 2006 at 12:00 am

   I had no previous experience with lockpicking, so in a sence I did actually learn something (=to open my pin-lock). That’s what the book gets 1 star for. The same information is however also available for free on the Internet, just google for “lockpicking tutorial” or something similar.

   Otherwise the book was a mess to read. It repeats itself over and over again (just to add up more pages to the otherwise thin book on a meager subject). It even shows the same one-page pictures twice. The books is apparently written i MS Word and printed out without checking what it looked like before making the final print. There are pages where the picture is on one page and the figure-text on the next page. There are even pages where the title for some chapter is at the end of one page when the chapter starts on the next page. Using photoshop to fix the b/w pictures would have also been an option, the author has apparently not heard of before.

   There are so many small and big non-topic-related factors in this book that it disturbs the topic itself. And although, I’m not a native English speaker, I think I could have produced a far better book than this (even on the same topic, after having practiced lockpicking for about a week now).

   Don’t buy it!
2. Sam Ohuia says:

   May 29, 2005 at 12:00 am

   Cool book. Was more impressed with learning how to crack combination locks than picking locks. In fact, I learn more from the authors computer website than I did in college.
3. BleebMaster says:

   May 28, 2005 at 12:00 am

   Locksmiths have launch a private war against publications like this in an effort to protect their “secrets”. This book is the most popular lock picking books in the world and is going to sell, regardless of the bad press from Locksmiths. The only lock picking secrets you can learn from locksmiths is; there is more money in drilling out locks than picking them.
4. Alan Leavy says:

   May 26, 2005 at 12:00 am

   A dreadful book. Full of mispellings, technical confusion and repetition. This book ‘might’ show you how to pick your first simple tumbler lock, but the MIT guide is a better bet for both newbies and seasoned lock pickers – at least the MIT guide goes into more detail about tensioning which is critical for any successful pick.

   Save your money on this amateur publication and download the free MIT guide.

   And the guy that wrote the book isn’t even a lock smith!
5. B. Pope says:

   January 11, 2005 at 12:00 am

   The book’s intended purpose as stated is to sell lockpicking as a competitive sport, or club. While I agree with the message, several problems made the book very nearly unreadable, and left me wondering why I’d spent money on what is so obviously an amateur web-page in bound form.

   As mentioned, much of the information is copy/pasted from one chapter to the next, up to and including diagrams and pictures, with no real reason for the repetition. I suppose the author might have wanted to illustrate how similar different types of locks are in function, but this is a poor way at best to do so. Additionally, numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes broke up whatever flow the book had, from the rapidly (and incorrectly) changing tenses in the author’s anecdotes, to simpler mistakes such as 6this. [sic]

   If you find this book used, it might be worth the price. Still, if you have any idea already how a lock works, you’re better off searching the web for How-To’s and FAQ’s. It’s obvious the author does know the material, and that’s what makes me most upset about the book. If he’d bothered to hire an editor, or even a proofreader, he would have improved the book’s quality immeasurably, and perhaps made it more saleable.