Mission Impossible Lock Picks

It is Friday so time for a more light-hearted post.

A few weeks back I came across a webpage with the following image. These are props from the film “Mission Impossible 3” and were used in a scene in the Vatican. I cannot say I remember noticing them when I saw the movie.

The original webpage has vanished from the net, so I do not have any of the additional images. The picks were designed so that the handle of each forms a sheath for the other pick so they can be carried as one compact unit. The construction material of the whole picks seems to be plastic, possibly of the same sort used to make credit cards. I have no idea as to whether they will work in real life.

Bizarrely, the writer of the original page referred to the picks as “files”.

Note that this set has no tension/ turning tool. I don’t recall what Tom Cruise did in the movie, but not using a tension tool is the number one movie mistake when it comes to lock picking.

As can be seen, the kit has a half diamond and a two-hump batarang. What amuses me about this is that it looks like it was made by someone who had heard about paired Bogotas but could not be bothered to web-search on what they actually looked like. (Knowing that I would write this article today, I tried picking a lock with my three batarang-style rakes last night. The lock only opened for one. The finger rakes, on the other hand, opened the same lock in a fraction of the time!)

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The Books