MIT Guide to Lock Picking
TL;DR — The 1991 guide that explained lock picking as a mechanical-tolerance problem rather than a trick.
⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. Explicitly free / author-released / CC.
Copyright 1987, 1991 Theodore T. Tool, “permission to reproduce this document on a non-profit basis is granted.”
The guide’s contribution is conceptual: picking works because manufacturing tolerances mean pins bind in sequence rather than simultaneously. Once that is understood, the technique follows from the mechanism instead of being a set of memorised motions.
A founding document of the locksport community, and one of the clearest pieces of technical writing on this list — it explains a physical system so well that the skill becomes obvious.
Where this came from
49 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.