Waaay back when I started high school, I was taught that a combination padlock worked thusly:
Turn clockwise at least three complete turns, then stop on the first number;
Turn counterclockwise one complete turn, then stop on the second number;
Turn clockwise directly to the third number.
Pull on the padlock and hope you did it right.
But lately, I’ve found out that the Dudley padlock I’ve been using at the gym doesn’t require those initial three turns ! In step 1, I can just turn clockwise directly to the first number, then continue with step 2 as usual.
Have I been wasting countless hours spinning padlock knobs uselessly since 1980, or have the rules changed recently?
The crappy ones we had in high school on our lockers were even worse than that, on closing it just moved about 3-4 ticks to the right of the final number, but didn’t reset any tumblers or anything.
So, if the owner didn’t bother to turn it after closing the locker, which few did, you could open by turning three ticks left and pulling.
I still have bad dreams about the built in combination locks on my highschool locker. Never could open those things. My senior year I just gave up and humped those books in a backpack. Only one person I ever knew in highschool guarded his lock with purpose,. He was the highschool weed dealer!
I hate twirling my combination at the gym (often while wet). So I’ve gotten some of those locks with separate dials that you line up.
One spells words, one just spells 58008, but I can just turn one dial if I want to live dangerously and leave it at 58009…
I am a she, and there was no one else in my backpack. It was just me toting my books down the hallway. Minding my own business. Trying to figure out how to get my locker unlocked. I hate those damn combination locks. Nearly ruined my life. Kinda like this thread!
I believe the 3 turns was to ensure all tumblers are reset for every possible combination the manufacturer makes, but depending on the specific combo you may not need those 3 turns. In school, which yes I hated those things, and would often forget the combo while away Christmas break, and especially over the summer, but I found that 2 turns worked, or ‘just spin’ it first
I never tried turning them back 3-4 ticks, but you could still determine the last digit of a person’s combination just by looking at them. Which was significant, because the locks at my high school came in blocks of 40, with identical combinations, just with the dial face rotated. Thus, if you took your combination and added the same number to all three digits, you’d end up with someone else’s combination. Or, alternately, if you already knew a few distinct combinations (from different blocks), and you knew the last digit of someone else’s, you had a few good guesses for what their full combination was.
This. Two complete turns suffice to clear the typical sort, but if you happened to start from just past your first number it takes just shy of three turns to get there.
Since more initial turns can’t hurt, and one too few turns all but guarantees failure, you can see where this is going. Couple dumb distracted kids with deliberately mysterious black-box machines and the “everybody knows” folk procedures get more and more complex.
One simple way the OP’s lock can achieve self-clearing is by making sure the correct numbers occur in the order and spacing where each setting naturally clears the next. That massively reduces the number of available combinations, but is really really cheap and easy to implement.
You know if you clear the combination by making three complete turns, when you come back and try it next time you just go directly to the first number … and clearing by one and a bit turns has the same effect on a simple combination lock: not unsetting the first number is the same as setting the first number.
Oh, I laughed right out loud, too. I forget sometimes I am talking to a cultured bunch. My dialect gets me in trouble quite alot. You should hear my southern accent.
