(116) Introduction to warded locks

Warded locks have been around since at least the Roman Empire over 2000 years ago and less has changed than you might think (or hope). You can still find them being sold (usually cheaply) or on older homes (they were common entry locks until the late 19th century and common interior locks until the late 20th century). Warded locks are extremely simple designs with few precision parts and if made with decent materials are incredibly robust against wear and weather (and will often still be perfectly fine after a lot of rough handling) but they offer no real barrier to tampering or even low skill non-destructive attacks (the first lock I ever picked was a warded cabinet lock in my preschool classroom).

But because of their age and the a lack of general knowledge many people still regard them as mysterious and will have many questions about them during training classes. I had thought I had done a video explaining these very simple locks previously but I discovered I had not so I put this together as a simple overview of how these locks work and how they can be opened.