LockPickingLawyer opens another Master Lock, exposing familiar weaknesses

LockPickingLawyer opened the week with episode 1654, “Master Lock Fails AGAIN!”, a 4:56 video that landed just hours before the crawl and pushed one of the channel’s oldest targets back into view. With about 4.67 million subscribers and roughly 1.6K videos, the channel is no longer a corner of hobby YouTube. Its own description says it exists to educate consumers about weaknesses and defects in security devices so they can make better security decisions, and that makes every new Master Lock teardown feel bigger than a single pick.

Master Lock is an easy brand for the hobby to recognize and a hard one to ignore. Founded in 1921 by locksmith-inventor Harry Soref, the company is headquartered in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and now sits under Fortune Brands Innovations. It has spent decades selling locks, combination padlocks, and security products as everyday hardware, which is exactly why the brand keeps becoming a reference point whenever a low-cost consumer lock turns out to have a weak spot.

The paper trail around Master Lock also gives the new video extra weight. In 2000, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Master Lock announced a recall of about 752,000 gun locks after a manufacturing discrepancy allowed the two halves to be manually separated without a key. In 2008, the CPSC announced another Master Lock recall, this time for about 27,000 Lock and Leash locks because red paint contained excessive lead, violating the federal lead paint standard. Master Lock’s own support pages say it will replace a product or part free of charge when a defect in materials or workmanship causes failure. Put together, the company’s warranty language and its safety history make a fresh public defeat video an especially sharp reminder of how often a familiar name can hide ordinary failures.

For locksport, the reaction to another Master Lock takedown is less surprise than calibration. Covert Instruments, the LockPickingLawyer-linked tool and training brand, sells picks, bypass tools, training kits, and instruction for hobbyists, locksmiths, and security professionals, which keeps the broader conversation centered on learning rather than spectacle. The practical takeaway for newcomers stays the same: Master Lock is still a useful classroom, but it is a poor place to assume security from branding alone. When the hobby’s most visible public classroom opens another Master Lock, the lesson is still about attack surfaces, failure modes, and why the logo on a padlock is never the whole story.