>Here in the great salty midwest, locking gas caps get corroded where
>they turn and this offers a great opportunity to twist off the ignition/
>door key. I  have found that a 1/4" straight blade screwdriver, fully
>inserted into the key slot and then turned with a channellocks (okay,
>German Knipex!) pliers one time will nicely BREAK all the finely
>engineered German lock wafers and render this formerly finicky POS
>(that's Point Of Sale) into a practical US engineered semi-locking gas
>cap that anyone can open with said straight blade screwdriver

Yargh! Barbarian! Well okay, I've done the same thing myself on assorted
wafer locks over the years. On the gas cap, though, what you're breaking is
the plastic cylinder walls, as the wafers are about the only thing in gas
cap made of metal. They probably just gouge deep grooves in the plastic,
possibly gumming up the works with plastic bits. The preferred way would be
to pull the wafers out entirely, making it easier to turn the cylinder. But
yeah, the Excessive Force method works perfectly well too, though it might
require additional future applications and is (naturally) non-reversible.

John Bange
'90 Vanagon "Geldsauger"