The best puzzle lock, ever?

...well don’t take my word for it – here’s what puzzling legend and collector extraordinaire, Edward Hordern had to say about it: "If I had to give away my entire collection of locks – there must be a hundred or two hundred of them – and keep only three, this recent acquisition would be one of them. As the other two are rather nice antique ones, we need not consider them any further here. To my way of thinking, the new lock is easily the best of the modern padlocks and is called 'DanLock'".

...I remember reading that before I bought my DanLock and thinking “Well, if EH thinks it’s that good, and he’s certainly played with more than a few puzzle locks in his time, it must be pretty special”, so I bought one from Grand Illusions. 

The first time you take it out of the bag, you get the very strong impression that something is very wrong with this picture: you get one good, solid Israeli- made lock and two keys – bit of a problem though since one of the keys is fastened to the locked shackle and the other has been sawn in half... and your mission, should you choose to accept it (and that’s an important choice that some folks dither over for quite some time, especially given how you start this little adventure!) is to open the lock and then return it to the state you found it in.

Good puzzles make you think, a lot. Great puzzles do that, and don’t let you do anything irreversibly harmful. This is a GREAT puzzle – EH was right on the money. 

There are several definite stages in this puzzle, not necessarily in order: “I wish I had a ...”, “You sneaky bas....”; “Ah well, how bad can it be?” and “A-Haaa!” – having worked my way through it, I found myself still wanting to know 

how the heck 

he’d done all that, 

in there, 

without leaving a trace of any form of tampering at all... 

Dan Feldman, Thank You sir – that really is a tremendous piece of work and a GREAT puzzle! (and sorry I’ve let it tarnish like that, but it’s been very well loved!)

[If you’re serious about DanLocks, you’ll have read about the two versions out there – B followed A and has an extra little sting in the tail – mine’s an A.]