At my meeting with Chris Gower yesterday he released himself from a pair of Chubb Escort handcuffs using a 2-bitted key thereby establishing a world record of 16 seconds for the feat, as shown in the video (link below)
In posting the video link to this site it comes through as rather jerky when it's done via Photobucket but I can promise you that in reality it was a very smoothe operation.
Mike Riccard
a.k.a. Mikeintightpants
Centre of England
Thanks Mike for all your efforts in recording me opening the Chubb Escort cuffs, glad I cut the grass and Jenny tied up the garden - thought it looked wonderful!
The Chubb AVA mechanism is in my view one of the post pick resistant locks. There are no springs involved (apart from on one at the bottom to keep the discs pushed up). We know there are 5 different cuts on the key and with a 9 disc lock that gives in theory 1,953,125 although we can eliminate 30% as no key would be 111111111 etc. With 10 discs the theoretical combinations are 9,765,625 again only 6 million would be used.
Having worked as a locksmith we were never able to copy the AVA keys but had to decode them eg:
232155344
434511322
Would be the cuts to programme the machine (note they always have to add up to 6).
As I am sure Ian will recall over 20 years ago I sent him a simple pick for the lower quality padlocks and we were able to open them in 10 seconds, however, the higher security locks and handcuffs so have small anti-pick nitches on the discs. What we do know is that when the key (any key) is put in the lock the disc numbers 3 will align. The set of Escorts I opened had a really nice key combination which had two sets of 5 together and two sets of 1 discs together plus 4 number 3 discs.
Michael I believe all Escorts are pickable BUT it is different when they do not have a working key to see i.e. by quickly decoding the key by eye the opening is possible.
Chris
