Locksmithing and Security

I might just have mentioned this before, but don’t lock your safe’s spare key or bypass key in the safe. Go and get it out now and put it somewhere else.

If you have two safes and are determined to put your spare keys in a safe, at least consider putting the spare for one inside the other. That way there’s at least a chance that when you lose or break one safe’s only living key, you have a working key to the safe where the spare is stored.

As you’ll guess, yesterday I attended a safe where “the key’s inside”. I don’t really mind as it’s all work of course. However, I wanted an example of this particular lock, and was a mite peeved that there was no need to put a replacement lock in.

Once or twice a month we (at least I assume it happens to other locksmiths) get a call along the lines of, “I’m abroad at the moment. There are some xs I’ve left in my flat. Will you go and let my friend in so’s he can y them to me.”

I’m afraid we won’t. Like the “constitution” of the UK, the law about what locksmiths can or can’t do isn’t written down. We spend most of our time in an arrestable state. Simply carrying the tools of our trade could be interpreted as going equipped to steal. Carrying a knife of any size is an offense unless it can fold and chop your finger off. (Knives with locking blades, even those shorter than the time-honoured three inches, currently count as fixed blade weapons.) Now of course any citizen of the UK can be arrested at any time for a whole raft of offenses, so we’re used to this. Even if you’ve ensured you have straw under the seat of your taxi, even if you did your archery practice last Sunday, you can still always be arrested for a Breach of the Peace, which means whatever the officer wants it to mean. (OK, I think the straw and the archery laws are no longer on the books, but they were there for a long time.) And of course as of the last few weeks, you can be arrested for photographing anything an officer deems sensitive. I’m slightly astonished that the footage (and photographers) of the events preceding the death of  Ian Tomlinson at the recent London G20 protests saw the light of day.

So I’m certainly not going to aid and abet anyone other than the rightful occupant in getting into their premises.

Naturally, there will be occasions when such a request is genuine. There are also occasions where a landlord by any reasonable judgement ought to be admitted to their premises. But I’m afraid the ice gets even thinner in these circumstances and our skates are not light.

What do you think?

I don’t suppose anyone has the measurements of an idealized thief, do they?

As I’m often advising on the securing of premises I’d like to know if anyone anywhere has standardized the smallest opening that risks a thief squeezing through.

I know about burglar bars, which are round bars spaced five inches apart. But there are a couple of drawbacks to burglar bars and I like to use what are called strapping grilles. But — what kind of rectangular opening can your typical emaciated n’er-do-well squeeze through? There’s a story of a thief getting into a Fifth Avenue store in New York through a 8 by 13 inch hole where the article’s author seemed utterly astonished. That seems like quite a decent gap to this undernourished Brit. Perhaps the astonished reporter was originally from Mississippi (the portliest state of the Union for several years (Colorado being the leanest)).

If the bars are five inches apart, I wonder what size a cell door hatch is limited to. I had to sort out a police cell a couple of years ago. I should have taken some measurements.

I’ve tried calling a Crime Prevention Officer but so far haven’t even managed to leave a message let alone talk to one. The police are like the banks now. You can’t ring up your branch. All the branch numbers are hidden. You can only ring a central switchboard that can’t find crime prevention officers.

I had to open a safe in a library the other day. It wasn’t in some backroom, it was out in the main reading area. It was a simple little thing with little residual value and they’d already ordered a replacement, so drilling it open rather than picking it open was a cheaper option for them. Every time I fired up the drill, though, two or three people would look up from their book and over toward my direction. No-one actually went, “Ssshhh”, however. Pity really; I couldn’t help feeling that they didn’t know their parts properly.

It was nice to be in a large, well-lit room, though. Although I started working on safes thinking that I’d be more comfortable than when kneeling on a doorstep in a wet and windy doorway — inside, warm, dry, nice carpet to kneel on — it turns out that most safes are crammed into the tiniest, badly lit, uncomfortable corner of the grottiest uncarpeted storeroom you can imagine. The oddest location was a safe that was in the staff toilet. It was quite a tall safe so I actually had somewhere to sit [sic] for once.

I had a couple of safes to open a little while back. One was an elderly Chubb and the other was a more recent Dudley. Both were key locks. Safes are divided roughly 60:40 in the UK between key locks and combination locks whereas in the States they’re nearly all combination locks. Of course, key locks are much more difficult for the safe engineer to open. Anyway, these two need different techniques so I started with the one that needed the venerable Hobbs pick. (I’ll come back to Mr Hobbs another day in another post.)

First you get as comfortable as you can. Other locksmiths poke fun at my collapsible chairs but hey. Then you get acquainted with the levers — seven in this case. You’re doing a couple of things here but it’s quite repetitious. You either get bored on unlucky days or you enter a Zen-like altered state on lucky days. This was a lucky day.

I wasn’t aware of it — that’s the point — but after five minutes there was almost nothing in my mind except a growing picture of my friends the levers. What I was also unaware of was that the lights had gone out; this was a basement of a delicatessen undergoing refurbishment and they’d cut the power to install some board or other and they’d told everyone but me.

So there I was in a gloomy corner, dressed in black (good for the image), forehead resting on a safe door, making no noise except for the occasional and pleasing click of a tumbler; and there was the electrics board that was about to be replaced, above my head. The electrician walked in pointing her torch high up at the board. I wouldn’t have heard her even if she’d been wearing wooden clogs.

I think we both screamed. I certainly lost all the levers.

Still, I don’t normally need meditation classes.