Drives me nuts when people drill out pinball and arcade locks. Just about every one of them can be raked open in about 10 seconds.

It's just so much easier to not do it. It's a little like flushing a toilet. Imagine if the main way that people did it was filling up bowls of water from the shower. Sure, it works, but there's this little lever that makes it faster and easier…

There's no magic to picking a crappy wafer lock.

It's a tensioner and a rake. The tensioner is a stiff steel L-shaped bracket that aids in turning the lock. The rake/pick is a thin piece of metal with a curved end or a couple of bumps that "set" the lock pins in position. Wafer locks in pinball machines are especially vulnerable to rake attacks.

So what you do is you tension the lock with the bar: firm pressure roughly equivalent to a tiny bit more than turning a key, and you insert the rake and drag it back and forth across the pins. With a little luck, the pins will set and the lock will turn.

It's not exactly lock picking, it's just that most pinball and arcade locks are so cheap and crappy that they don't stand up to the most basic of attacks. This would never (should never) work on your car ignition or front door of your house.