safecracker at large

Safe Protectors When people acquire locked safes, the most natural reaction is wanting to know what's inside. Let me be the first to tell you: Old or new, most locked-up safes acquired without combinations will prove to be empty. Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part you shouldn't expect to find someone's valuable forgotten/abandoned stash of money, jewelry, or whatever. True enough, the only way to know for sure is to open it and do a thorough inspection. It's also a fact that a small percentage of such safes do have contents. Until you know, the answer to the "what's inside?" question is "anything that fits." Contents really can be anything, ranging from worthless to worthwhile. No matter what opening process you choose, though, be careful the first time the door swings. Just as a locked safe can hold valuables, it can also hold dangerous things. What follows here might have you thinking twice about tearing it op...

  Costco Mentality   No matter where you bought your safe, no matter who you bought it from, if you need to have it opened, you're going to need the services of a safe technician unless you do it yourself. People are often aghast at the prices they hear for such work . . . "$$$! That's more than I paid for it!"   Maybe it is, but why should I apologize?   The opening price rocked you, and probably because it's more money than you imagined it would be. But I'm not in charge of your imagination, am I? Where did you get your pricing ideas in the first place?   Also, what do think will have to be done in order to get your safe opened?   Blast or burn? C'mon, willya . . ? Do you seriously think that's how it gets done by legitimate technicians? I'll bet the only ideas you have about safe opening are what you've seen on TV and movies. Am I right? And do you think those types of media are dealing in reality or entertainm...

©2012 by Ken Dunckel Safecracker Safe and Vault Service  SF Bay Area & Northern CA kendunckel@aol.com 415-203-7298 A Fly On The Wall Observations while working on safes . . . Because of the work I do and where I do it, I get exposed to a lot of different work environments. I get to see what people do (and don't do) in their daily work, hear them talking about topics that interest them. As a self-employed individual, one of the things I envy about some people's job situations is the benefit packages. Especially government jobs. People in government (city, county, state, Federal) jobs might not be getting rich  at the work, but it seems (with some notable exceptions) that if you land that government job at almost any level, you're (generally) in a much better situation than people working in the private sector. Once a worker has passed probation and is settled into the job, there are things like paid health care, paid sick leave and vacations, employee r...

Copyright 2012 by Ken Dunckel Safecracker Safe and Vault Service Serving San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California Licensed and Insured 415-203-7298 kendunckel@aol.com In the past month I've followed the work of two misinformed do-it-yourselfers. 1) A property owner found a safe left behind by the previous resident. Not only was it in the way of the remodeling, he was curious about whether there were contents. A contractor doing work there assured the owner that he could open the safe. Long story short: The contractor failed. He didn't give up until after doing grievous damage to the safe with hammers and grinders. In other words, a safe that could have been opened with zero to minimal damage and made usable was reduced to a piece of unrepairable junk. After paying me to open it, the owner had to have it hauled out and scrapped. This was a clear-cut case of "contractor machismo." Plenty of able-bodied guys with pickup trucks and job boxes f...

Safe Bash! Ken Dunckel Owner, Safecracker Safe and Vault Opening, SF Bay Area and Northern California 415-203-7298 kendunckel@aol.com Safe-opening party themes have caught on. I just helped out with another one, but the one I'll tell you about here happened a few years ago, in the days before reality shows caught on. Barry, a lover of antiques, memorabilia, and good times, was hosting a Roaring Twenties Chicago gangland-style Saturday soiree for forty. Party theme: "Come See Barry's Antique Safe Get Opened." Barry supplied speakeasy, hooch, and safe; I catered the safe-opening services. Barry's Safe Bash was to be at his home in Marin County, just north of San Francisco over the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge. Marin County was once portrayed in a much-protested pseudo-factual TV documentary ( "I Want It All Now" ) as a place populated mostly by New Age Airheads Who Frolic In Hot Tubs While Tickling Each Other With Peacock...

Expert or Dabbler? By Ken Dunckel Owner, Safecracker Licensed Expert Safe and Vault Service Serving the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California 415-203-7298 CA Contractor 553337 CA License 1985 Not much to report lately except that things in this business have been a little busier than in the previous three months. I don't pretend to know why a business like mine gets busy or slows down. Maybe a demographics expert would know how to analyze it. One thing that hasn't stopped (or even slowed down) is the way people who shouldn't represent themselves as able to do my work persist in doing so. Here's how it happens: A safe owner or a safe user/employee has a problem with the safe. Either it's been giving more trouble than usual for days or weeks or the problem happens suddenly. The next thought is a logical one: Call a locksmith, right? That would be the answer, except that the telephone books have a different category for safes and...

Ken Dunckel Safecracker Safes and Vaults Opened and Repaired San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California 415-203-7298 CA License 1985 CA Contractor License 553337 "How much do you charge to open a safe?" This is one of the most common questions I hear. The answer is there are as many prices as there are safes, and there are a lot of safes. It's like asking a garage owner "How much do you charge to fix a car?" You are going to have to supply more information before the garage owner can even begin to tell you. Make, model, year, and the nature of the problem. That makes sense, right? It's the same with safes, but here's the frustrating part. The majority of people can rattle off a list of every car they ever owned; make, model, year, color, and what have you, and they can do it from memory. This is pretty good when you think about it, given that so many people change cars several times or more through their adult car-owning lives. No...

Ken Dunckel Owner, Safecracker Safe & Vault Service in the SF Bay Area and Northern California CA License 1985 CA Contractor 553337 415-203-7298 Mobile kendunckel@aol.com A man who ran a garment factory in a nineteenth century Chinatown building hired me to open a big double door safe. It had been trapped in the basement since before the 1906 Earthquake. Lots of big old safes downtown are trapped now with so many sidewalk freight lifts gone extinct. At first there was a language problem, but we had common ground, since we were both fluent in Arabic numerals. I wrote down my price, he looked, said okay. The price I'd given didn't warrant spending manipulation/dialing time on a lock as difficult as I know that type to be, so I drilled and used optics to open it. The main door swung as the owner watched. Inside were three heavyweight burglary resistive inner chests, two key-locked, one combination locked. This was a very deluxe setup, then or now. They filled t...

It's been several months now since the Tahoe Mystery Safe got opened, but the production company didn't live-stream it on the web as they told me they would. Supposedly they're saving a video sequence of it for the TV show "Found" on the Oprah Winfrey Network. If they can sell it, that is. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's too much YouTube, or maybe I'm imagining things, but it seems as if safe burglaries (or burglary attempts) are on the rise. I'm not doing any formal tracking, but I feel as if I hear about this more often nowadays. As always, the majority of recent and past incidents are classifiable as attempts, rather than successful openings. However, there have a few more knowledgeable attacks, or so it would seem. In fact, recently someone forwarded a web link to an official-sounding alert re: an increase in ATM and bank vault attacks in Southern California by some well-organized and efficient groups that specialize in banks and ATMs. ...

How do I even know that the person who hires me to open a safe actually owns it? This is most worrisome when it involves residential calls I get at night. For Instance: A caller from a residence needs to have a safe in a home opened, and right away. I never know if the caller actually owns the safe or if Aunt Mary's crackhead nephew is taking advantage of the fact that Aunt Mary is traveling, or in the hospital, or whatever. After all, it's work, and we all need to work. And work of the of the service-to-your door genre commands higher fees in almost any night, weekend, or holiday situation. So of course I'm interested. Typically I ask a lot more questions of residential safe owners on night work than I might in the daytime: What's the matter with it? Do you know the combination numbers? Is it one that you open on a regular basis? When was the last time it opened successfully? Are you sure you're entering the combination correctly? What is the maker...

It's been a while since my last post. Other stuff has been eating the time. The safe work has been same as ever, from spotty to busy, with no clue as to why it goes one way or another, but that's entertainment, I guess. The latest news of note is that last week a man called me from somewhere in the East, introduced himself as a producer, then asked if I would be interested in being in a reality TV show. It went to voicemail, where every call from unfamiliar out of state numbers goes --- too many human and robot phone solicitors these days. After I heard his message, I texted back, thanked him for asking (always flattering to be asked), then told him he probably wasn't interested in paying my rates, but offered to put him in touch with other industry people who might be more amenable. Mentioning "my rates" usually throws cold water on things like this. I learned earlier; other independent producers have contacted me in the past with grandiose plans...