safecracker at large

"My safe won't open. I know the combination and I haven't been having any trouble with it." Above is a very common job call. It comes most often from people with safes in their homes, and it happens most often when a safe has a numbered mechanical dial. Suddenly, after months or years of trouble-free use, the owner enters the combination as usual, and . . . nothing. The dial doesn't stop like it used to, and the handle that retracts the bolt won't turn either. The above describes a lot of the "sudden" lockouts safe openers respond to. People who have safes in their homes are usually infrequent users, meaning they open their safes once a week or less. But something is causing today's problem. Safes don't just sit there and suddenly decide on their own to not operate. Safes do break, but unless it's something obvious, safes in homes are less subject to spontaneous breakage from abuse or lack of service. Notice I didn't say they...

Safe Types If you call for pricing on safe service of any kind, you'll help the safe company help you if you give information that's easy to understand.   Sometimes we on the service side have to struggle to understand what callers are trying to tell us with regard to their problems. It's usually not their fault, because how could they know the arcane jargon and terminology of safes and vaults? Often the made-up terms we hear from safe users are enough to give us an idea, but it's also very common to hear some very confusing made-up terms. Not knowing exactly what you have can cause me to misquote your work. In other words, if I misunderstand what you have or what your problem is, you might hear pricing that is very off-putting to say the least. The other side of this is if I misunderstand what I'm told, provide low-end pricing, you okay it, then I arrive to find that the job to be done is a lot more than I expected, you might feel like I...