Nine tagged in the basket · shop shuts at twelve · it's twenty past eleven
Grab a blank off the wall up there — just drag along the board with your finger, the hooks run 14 through 61 — and it'll come down onto the counter here and I'll draw you the section through the shoulder. Then pull a job out of the basket and I'll lay the two profiles over each other, because that is genuinely the whole of step one and if step one's wrong nothing after it matters. Sorry. I talk. Col says I talk.
Nothing on the counter yet. Blank on the left, customer's keyway on the right, overlay underneath.
Paper tag, rubber band, name and what it's off. Two of them are code jobs, no key to trace.
Depths get drawn from the shoulder datum. Spacing 0.156" per position unless the book says otherwise.
Cut to code whenever a code exists. Tracing copies their wear as well as their cuts.
Shear line's the red rule. Every stack has to split exactly on it. Two thousandths proud and it holds.
The board's arranged by keyway family, not by who made the padlock. That's why hook 31 there covers eleven brands and hook 47 covers one. Two blanks can look absolutely identical laid flat on the counter and one of them is missing a groove down the belly and that one will never enter, not halfway, not with a tap, never. Extra milling's usually fine — more milling just means more clearance — but a groove that isn't there can't clear a ward that is. DON'T file a groove in. I asked. He said no twice.
And the shoulder is the datum. Every single cut is measured from the shoulder. Seat it a sixteenth wrong in the vice and all five cuts land a sixteenth out and the key comes off the machine looking absolutely beautiful and opens nothing. That's the one that gets me. It looks right.