SonicCare® Lock Picks

article by Ben Lincoln

Years ago I read some instructions online for building a vibrating lockpick out of an electric tooth-flossing device. This results in a tool very similar in concept to an actual locksmith's tool, because the electric flosser had a travel distance of a few millimeters.

In the middle of 2012, I was at the grocery store and noticed a SonicCare® toothbrush designed to use regular AA batteries instead of a built-in rechargeable cell. In addition to the replaceable batteries, I thought that maybe its lower price would make it a good candidate to be converted into a different type of powered pick.

My experience is that at least for people who are not very good at lock-picking, this tool can make a big difference for certain types of lock — in particular, I have some Steelcase cabinets that open almost instantly with one of these picks, even though it takes me much longer when picked manually. However, now that I have had a bit of practice, using manual picks is generally far superior. These picks look pretty neat, though.

Unfortunately, I lost most of the in-progress/how-to photos because of the bad default behaviour of iOS at the time^[1]. The basic idea is:

Remove the brush assembly from the shroud that screws into the handle.
Remove the plastic brush from the metal central shaft of the brush assembly — I used a rasp to remove enough of the plastic on one side to pull the rest off.
Cut a pick down to a short enough size to attach to the metal shaft of the brush assembly.
Attach the pick to the metal shaft — I used epoxy and hockey tape.
(Optional) Before re-attaching the shroud, paint the shroud and/or body of the toothbrush.

Various substeps of steps 2 and 3 are pictured in the few photos I still have of the construction.

Parts

Pick / brush assembly / shroud

Pick scored where it will be cut to length

Shortened pick

I made a bunch of them with custom paint jobs to give to friends and other people on my team at work.

Customized Picks

I also made some experimental alternate tips to see if this could be a multipurpose tool. Unfortunately, none of these proved useful.

Alternate Tips

All of the alternate tips

Rake 1

Rake 2

Flat pick to mimic a traditional vibrating pick

Vibroblade

Engraving tool

Sonic screwdriver

If you're better at picking than I am and have an opinion on whether this works well or not, please let me know. I will probably bring mine to the Lockpick Village at DefCon 23 and ask there if nothing else.

Footnotes

I had taken the photos with my iPad right before an iOS update was released. At the time, this is the sequence of events that would (and did) unfold with iTunes in its default configuration:

Some time previously, the iPad has been connected to a PC running iTunes, and therefore automatically backed up.
The iOS update begins.
The iOS update fails, and the device must be reset to the factory state of the new iOS version. But this is OK, because the content was backed up previously, right?
The reset iPad is connected to the PC, which detects that the state of the device is newer than the most recent backup. This triggers another backup.
This new backup overwrites the previous backup, replacing the extremely-useful file which contained photos and whatnot with a "backup" that is identical to the factory image.

I hope Apple fixed that at some point. I stopped using my iPad for serious purposes shortly afterward.