A recent post on the punkishly popular engineering project site Hackaday details efforts to 3D print standard Kwikset keys. There’s a free OpenSCAD file so you can too.

A treasure trove of wonderful projects by people far smarter than we, Hackaday does a good job highlighting choice examples from its industrious community. Take user Dave Pedu’s recent project for example. He is “creating copies of keys using a 3D printer and OpenSCAD”.

Hackaday-er Pedu began his efforts by eyeballing a SketchUp model of his home Kwikset key, which would ultimately prove to be unfit for purpose. To simplify the process and remove the effort of making manual adjustments, he switched to OpenSCAD.

With some tinkering, Pedu created an OpenSCAD program that takes the data of Kwikset’s KW1 key specifications (which he procured from a pdf found online) and can output an accurate models of a key.

Handily OpenSCAD can export files as STLs. Thrown into a slicer for print prep (for those trying it at home, beware of scaling issues since OpenSCAD is unitless), it’s best to print the keys in something tougher than PLA. Given their thinness and fragility, ABS is a better option.

The key model-generating file can be downloaded from the project’s page on Hackaday.

3D Printing Keys: A Saga

We’re no strangers to 3D printing keys here at All3DP. In fact, back in 2014 the Washington Post made a blunder regarding this very subject, and it got us all a flutter.

In a story covering the USA’s Transportation Security Administration’s checking of travelers’ luggage, it posted pictures of the master keys the organization uses to unlock them. This image of an innocuous swatch of numbered keys was all enterprising hackers needed to produce 3D models.

We gave it a go and the results were… not great.

The story calmly ebbed away, like an additive manufacturing-enabled cat-burglar in the night. Years later the files are still publicly available on GitHub for anyone with a 3D printer to make their own.

Sensational as it sounds, this practice of 3D printing keys amounts to little more than curiosity-sating fun. They’re impractical, inefficient and time consuming. For all the cost and time-savings 3D printing offers specific industries, the opportunistic burglar is probably not one.

But all it takes are a handful of bad eggs to ruin the fun. As one commenter on our old story aptly put it, “it is the lost sense of security that matters”.

Source:  Hackaday