SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2024, @12:46PM
At one job, the chief technician asked me to help them move a locked safe they couldn't find the combination for from an office to one of our storerooms.
I got down to the office the safe was located to find five people already struggling to move the bugger, it eventually took eight of us.
A month or so later, I get a call from the chief technician to come to the storeroom they'd moved it to as they'd gotten the combination (from a retired staff member) and opened it.
Lead lined, approx 1'9" of the stuff, with further (empty) lead containers stacked inside the tiny (compared to the safe size) internal space, turns out it was an old 'hot' sources safe from 30 or so years previous that they'd inherited from a departmental merger and had forgotten about.
As we'd no radioactive material in the building, a present was made of it to a local scrap dealer - no questions or paperwork.
Several months later, in a hunt for some laser equipment last seen mouldering away in one of our dead stores, I come across several boxes of various radioactive sources in an unlocked steel cupboard...along with several gallons of mercury (but that, as they say, is another story...).