"Handcuffs?"
"That's right, handcuffs. They're simple equipment used to restrain criminals or prisoners of war." Luo Chong explained casually.
"Oh, oh! Then I'll go find someone right away. You need researchers who are working on bolt actions and are skilled with springs, right? I'll go now. Please wait a moment, Chieftain." Lin Fei agreed and immediately went to find someone for Luo Chong.
"Mm!" Luo Chong answered, then sat in the office and waited. With nothing else to do, he saw some blank paper and pencils on Lin Fei's desk, so he casually picked up a sheet and began sketching a design for handcuffs.
He had played around with handcuffs before. He could even use things like wire and hairpins to pick their locks. That was because their mechanism was truly super simple: they used a pair of ratchets that could only rotate in one direction, allowing them to lock quickly.
Inside a handcuff's lock was a toothed bar whose teeth faced opposite those on the outer ring of the iron band. A folded spring pressed the bar outward from below, making its teeth mesh with those on the outer ring. Turning the key in the keyhole pressed the toothed bar down, releasing the outer ring. Rotating it in the opposite direction pushed a small iron rod into the spring and locked it completely. Of course, it could still be opened with a key.
In other words, handcuff keys were universal. Even without a key, one could still easily open them by using a small piece of metal to move the spring aside. Forget professional thieves—even ordinary people, so long as they knew how the mechanism worked, would have no trouble picking handcuffs.
However, that applied to the early models of handcuffs. Later, users discovered that they were far too