When most people think about designing a puzzle, they imagine starting with a blank canvas. You sketch out an idea, decide on the mechanics, build the geometry around the challenge you want to create. Total creative freedom.
My process is completely different.
Every Puzzlocks puzzle starts with a real, industrial padlock. Not a toy. Not a prototype. A heavy brass lock built for factories, warehouses, and high-security applications.
My job is to reach inside that existing mechanism and hide a puzzle within it, sometimes without anyone on the outside being able to tell anything has changed.
That constraint changes everything.
Working inside the box
When you design inside an existing industrial lock, you are not working with open space. You are working with pre-existing steel chambers, factory pin configurations, and tolerances that were engineered with one purpose in mind: to never be opened without the right key.
To turn that into a puzzle, I have to find the tiny hidden spaces within the mechanism and use them. Sometimes that means exploiting a small cavity to hide a tool. Sometimes it means repurposing a factory component to do something it was never designed to do. Sometimes it means creating a sequential discovery path through a system that was originally built to be completely linear.
Most modifications has to feel invisible from the outside. The lock has to look and feel exactly like a normal padlock. The weight, the shackle, the finish - none of it should give anything away. The puzzle is entirely hidden inside.
The assembly problem
Here is where it gets really interesting.
Even if I come up with a brilliant internal modification on paper, it has to survive the assembly process. The factory that builds my locks mainly produces standard industrial locks at high volume. Their machinery, their presses, and their alignment sequences were not designed with my modifications in mind.
I recently came up with a design I was genuinely excited about. The concept was solid. The mechanism worked on paper. But when we tried to implement it on the line, it almost broke the assembly machine. That would have been a serious problem - not just for my production run, but for a factory that has its own high-volume schedule to keep.
The design had to go back to the drawing board.
This is the reality of building puzzle locks the way I build them. Every idea has to survive not just the engineering test, but the manufacturing test. The two do not always agree.
Why the constraint is worth it
I could design puzzles from scratch. Custom geometry, purpose-built cavities, total control over every dimension. Many puzzle designers do exactly that.
But there is something about working inside a real industrial lock that changes how people interact with the puzzle. The weight is real. The brass is real. The mechanism has a heritage and a history that you can feel in your hands.
When someone picks up a Puzzlocks puzzle for the first time, they do not think they are holding a toy. They think they are holding a lock. And then they try to open it.
That moment of surprise - when something that looks completely normal turns out to be anything but - is what I am designing for every time.
It only works because the lock is real.
Want to know more?
If you are curious about the full range of puzzles, how they differ in difficulty, and which one might be right for you or someone you want to give it to, I put together a complete guide here: