Locksmithing and Security

Hopefully back again after a hiatus for holidays and blog software malfunctions.

What’s been happening? Well I think I reached the point where I need checklists to remind me to read my checklists. I was scheduled to replace a cylinder in a garage door. Now garage doors don’t often have cylinders. Usually they just have a cheap wafer lock built into the handle. But this one was in a better league and had a proper cylinder. (If you’re popping out to check yours, it’s easy enough: where does your key go? Does it go into something that looks like a front door “Yale” with  a circular front at least an inch across? If so — good. Does it go into something that looks like an upside-down pear / exclamation mark? If so — good. If it goes into something circular that’s about half-an-inch across and looks to be part of the handle, well, not quite so good.)

Anyway, this was a cylinder and garage door cylinders are usually what are called half (or single) euro-profile (the pear shape) cylinders. (There’s usually no need to be able to lock them from the inside.)

This does mean, though, that one method for opening, when the key has been lost, is unavailable. So I made a note that just in case I couldn’t pick the lock open, I should ensure that the drill was on board. And as I have a habit of grabbing the drill but forgetting the drill bits, I dutifully made sure I grabbed the drill bits as well.

When I got there I’d remembered everything except the picks! All I had was a small wallet of basic picks, a bit like you see in the movies. I was tempted just to go back and get the full kit, since the basic picks are not all that easy; but I thought I should save some exhaust fumes, be more positive and give it a go. And — glory be — it opened.

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.

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.