Master Lock 2
Holy crap, this method worked! I finally got around to trying it, and the article’s method for finding the last digit actually gave me something to go on. Granted, I was losing faith, since I had tried almost 60 of the 64 possible combinations off that last digit before the lock popped. But it worked. I now have one more relatively easy to crack $5 combination lock to use at the gym. (Not a serious security threat, I think. It’s not clear how many former jocks are at a given gym, compared to former geeks. At Stuyvesant, where everyone was at least a semi-geek, it was common knowledge that these types of Master Locks can be trivially cracked. Fewer people knew how to do it — I had to find the docs on the web, but at least I knew there was a method. I’m not sure how many people in non-geeky high schools knew about the vulnerabilities in these locks, or would remember such things. That, and there are few people who are sociopathic enough to crack locks in a commercial gym, as opposed to a high school locker, since the stakes would now reach the level of felonies and not pranks.)
The main observation in the article was that the real last number may not “get stuck” exactly on the mark. It’s distinguished by a small difference — a quarter of a tick mark — from the fakes. I’m still surprised I saw the difference; it’s subtle, and you have to write down the details for every sticking point on a piece of paper.
Total time, with pencil and paper, was about 30 minutes. It’s the first lock I’ve cracked.
A side note: sometimes, I think the majority of hits for www.cjc.org comes from Google searches on ways to crack MasterLock combination locks. Well, for you guys, the above link is a good way to go about it.