In the vain hope that one of you has encountered this with positive results…
Short story: I bought one of those ‘you set the combination’ travel locks at Target. I set the combination. Apparently I didn’t set it correctly, because when I closed the lock, I couldn’t open it again, no matter what combination of numbers I tried.
There’s no 1-800 number, there’s not even a brand name. It’s a “TSA-approved” lock so maybe if I went to an airport they could open it, but I don’t have time for that.
Three digits? A thousand possible combinations? Shouldn’t take more than an hour to try them all. So it’s that or decide that your time isn’t worth the price of a new lock and buy another one.
ETA: did you try the original default setting, probably 0-0-0? Maybe you didn’t actually reset it, and it’s still that.
Sunday, my wife and I were with our seven year old daughter in the one-room schoolhouse at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. We were alone in the building. The teacher’s desk in the front of the school room was locked with a small combination lock.
We’d been in there about a minute when our daughter announced, “I unlocked the desk.” She told us how she thought of the numbers it might be, tried it, and found her first guess was correct. I’m still amazed. (We found, among other things, that although it’s an 1830s historical village, they’ve secretly hidden a telephone in the desk.)
We found a lock-box in a storage unit that used to belong to my wife’s sorority. The only thing left in there was that and the man that owned it called her to come get it because she was the contact back when. They hadn’t been in there or paid for it in months, so she brought it home and I sat down, starting at 000. Took my about 45 minutes. It’s kind of the easiest way (at least in my experience…)
Give it to some anal rententive kids. When I was in high school, I one time found a 4-digit combination lock, and during the lectures, I would play with it trying different combinations. At times, other kids would try combinations as well… it was eventually cracked by someone else. The funny part is, he had used some kind of silly mathematical formula to try to figure out what the combination was, and for the combination that worked, he had miscalculated. :smack:
TSA has a passkey; they can open an approved lock independent of the combination. So asking them to open the lock for you probably doesn’t help you as much as a brute-force attack on the combo would help.
If it’s the kind I have, with spinning disks, then you can sometimes just force it a bit.
Put pressure on the hasp, placing the entire lock under tension. Then start tweaking the wheels a bit. With luck, on a cheap lock, one will be stickier than the others, this is the wheel most under tension by the hasp.
Turn it bit by bit until you feel it kind-of slip into place, kinda like falling into a detent position.
This should put another wheel under tension which you can then rotate until it falls into place.