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.

I was installing a safe. It was medium sized. That means it weighed in at around 300 kg. Now I hadn’t carried it upstairs. I don’t move safes. That’s a very specialized job. Several safe engineers are missing toes or even entire feet through not realizing this. I was bolting the thing down and changing its combination away from the manufacturer’s default combination.

The new owner was fretting that the floor wasn’t strong enough. It’s a valid consideration but think about it, I said. What about a group hug? Well I confess of course that I didn’t really want to get all that intimate with four stockbrokers I’d only just met. I was merely pointing out that four people standing together on a metre square area of floor weren’t about to go crashing through to the floor below. Although it should be said that this was London and not Memphis.

Talking of standing together, what kind of floor space would the entire population of the world require if we all stood shoulder to shoulder? When I was born we could all have fitted on the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of England. We couldn’t quite manage it now. I deny any responsibility of course.

And talking of safes, if you’ve ever bought one, you were told I hope that they are often delivered with the same, standard, manufacturer’s combination. If all the numbers of your safe’s combination are divisible by ten (or even by five) you might want to change the combination or get us to do it for you.

“And what might Sir be wanting this time?” The sales assistant’s tone held a hint of sarcasm. I had already been to the counter of a Shepher’s Bush hire shop twice. The first time was to get ear defenders. The second time was to get a breathing mask.

I had been asked to open a vault door that had stayed undisturbed for at least twenty years. This was in the basement of a disused bank building that had been sold once to the usual trade of the area — the rag trade — and was about to be sold again. The upcoming owners wanted full use of the basement but there were these two vaults to be removed. The vault that the late, but probably unlamented, bank had actually been using was already open. Praise be for that. It was a Tann vault door a foot thick with two very serious combination locks, thermal and mechanical relockers, glass, … Something I wouldn’t want to tangle with.

The other vault was much more modest but much more interesting. Because it had a very old Hobbs lock on it and I wanted a Hobbs lock for my practice/collection shelf. I’d already checked with the agent that I could take any “scrap” I wanted.

First of all I’d had a good look around. Inside the scary Tann vault were two regular safes. (By now shoulder-high monstrous safes seemed regular.) And inside one of the safes was a drawer which when picked open contained around 130 keys. Some were labelled; some were not. One of them had looked like a Hobbs key — hooray. But it hadn’t opened the old vault — boo. The key had fitted but nothing inside would budge. I’d sent in clouds of Plusgas penetrating spray with no success. I’d gone away, come back and sprayed WD40, and gone away again. Nothing. Still hadn’t budged.

All this was in an unlit basement that had been deserted for a couple of years. Just me and my portable lamp. I really didn’t want to put a hole in the lock so I had put a little hole in the door and looked inside with a borescope. I could see that one common trick with very old vault doors wasn’t going to work. The boltwork inside the door was pretty robust stuff; it had none of the give that the trick relies on.

So I had decided to make two cuts right through the door and into the main bolt bar thereby removing a crucial section of it, and allowing the handle to move the boltwork despite the lock’s bolt still being engaged in the main bolt bar. (A safe lock has a bolt but that’s not what secures the safe door. The lock’s bolt simply stops the safe’s main bolt work — five 3-inch iron bolts in this case — from moving.)

After two minutes of cutting, I was hearing loud ringing noises. All the walls of the basement were bare and echoing madly. My poor ears. I had brought no ear defenders. (Silly.) But there was a hire shop three doors down the street. So I’d gone and bought some ear defenders.

After another two minutes of cutting I had tasted iron. “This is quite a small cellar; and there’s no air moving”, I thought. “Pretty silly of me not to have brought a mask”. At least the goggles were where they should have been in the van, and were already perched on my nose. Back to the hire shop.

Now I could smell burning. But not burning iron. This door was of giant-sparkler-grade iron. The spark shower was unusually impressive. The sparks were bouncing off the low ceiling and onto what little hair I have remaining.

“Do you have any hats”, I was sheepishly asking the hire shop assistant on my third visit. They didn’t. I remembered being shown how to make a “printer’s pie” at some point in another career. People operating printing presses would make protective hats out of newsprint. So I made myself a hat from that day’s Independent. It must have looked quite a sight. I think I was probably cackling madly by this point.

Well, I got my lock. Undamaged. And, by the time it was finally out of the opened door, the key — yes, it was the right one — had decided to eventually start working.

If your safe is beeping at you, it’s probably trying to tell you that its battery is failing. Please minister to its needs and replace the battery. Especially if some genius designer has put the batteries inside the safe. And if you can’t face changing the batteries please do just pop and check that the override key and the instructions aren’t locked inside the safe.

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.