Popp Lock T10

Rainer Popp is definitely the master of puzzle locks… he has a reputation for producing challenging puzzles in the form of beautifully crafted locks, so his new designs are eagerly anticipated by both puzzle and lock collectors around the globe. 

When I spotted an alert from Rainer to say that his newest design, the innocuously named T10, was available for sale, I immediately dropped an email to my favourite puzzle purveyor to ask if any might be available and ordered one on the spot… and I’m very glad that I did as they seemed to be pretty much all sold by the following morning – in fact, as I sit writing this I’m not aware of a single re-seller who has any in stock… :-(

It arrived on a Monday evening and it’s a brute, weighing in at about a kilo – it looks every inch the big, solid, secure padlock. Designed to look like a padlock made up of stacked steel plates, it’s made of, err, stacked steel plates, topped and tailed with brass bars and the obligatory stainless steel hasp. It comes with an interesting key and the padlock has a very obvious place to shove it…

A cursory examination of the lock in its unsolved state shows an interesting feature… and once you start playing with the mechanism, you instantly know exactly what you’re trying to achieve…

So the first thing we do is insert the key and turn … and something rather magical happens – hypnotic even… to the extent that I spent probably the best part of an hour experimenting with that simple little motion, and a couple of variations on it… if that were it’s only party trick, I’d be sold on it… but it gets better!

From your initial experiments you’ll learn how to influence things, and that there are obstructions to just how freely you can choose to influence those things… sometimes that can be a right pain in the shackle!

I spent a really long time in this phase of the solve… getting myself to the place where I thought I was able to pretty much do everything that I wanted to be able to … almost – there was always one little element that eluded me, and I’d pretty much concluded that it was impossible… and that was the little breakthrough I needed: allowing myself to think that it might be impossible.

From there there’s a delightful little discovery that literally provides the key to further progress… and it still took me more than a week to finally solve the thing from there… I had it so close for ages that I could just about reach out and touch the solution, but it refused to budge… turned out I was actually quite a long way off, it just looked like I was close… and in the end it had taken me many, many hours over the course of three weeks to finally solve it…

This thing is a brute of a puzzle – nobody is ever going to open this one and feel cheated out of a sense of achievement – EVER! 

In fact, I’d probably go as far as to say that if Rainer didn’t ship them with a solution booklet, quite a few of them would remain unsolved.

Investment-grade hard-core puzzle lock from the master…