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https://www.locksmithledger.com/keys-tools/article/10229247/unlocking-a-gary-tl-15-round-door-safe
A man once closed and locked a safe, knowing that the combination was written down ... somewhere. Ten years later, the safe remained locked and the combination had not been found. Since the owner of this safe wanted to start using it for his business, the company requested my services as a safecracker.
When I arrived at that business, I was led to the safe shown in Figure 1. It was a red Gary safe with a jeweled steel face and a chrome-plated, spy-proof Sargent & Greenleaf dial. The serial number on the door was 46792. I knew very little about this model of safe. In fact, everything I knew is what I just told you. I simply had not yet had the privilege of working on any hinged round doors made by Gary. It is wonderful, when approaching a job like this, to have good documentation of all relevant details about the safe. This article, however, is intended to demonstrate that a good plan of attack can often be devised even without such information.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday July 03 2024, @07:58AM (2 children)
Oooh...what a bummer!
I have some of those S&G mechanical locks. On mine, if the file cabinet they were protecting is open, it was trivial to pop the back cover to see the slots on the rotating disks, and see what combination you had to enter to get the three slots to line up so the bail would fall into all three slots which then retracted the bolt.
Very simple mechanism that worked well.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2024, @11:03AM (1 child)
On a bigger stage, does anyone else remember Richard Feynman's story of picking the locks (for fun) on filing cabinets full of nuclear secrets, at Los Alamos?
I think the story is in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" -- I highly recommend this book to anyone. When it came out in paperback I bought several copies and gave them to friends.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2024, @01:42AM
I remember that book well, and I too bought copies and gave them out to friends at the time.
We're getting close to 100 years after those safecracking stories and the main lesson is still the same and unheeded: CHANGE THE DEFAULT COMBO (or password)