safecracker at large

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...

Safecracking Scenes: How To Get A Safe Cracked or, Bill & Ted's Excellent Safecracking Job By Ken Dunckel Owner, Safecracker SF Bay Area and Northern California 415-203-7298 Situation: Business partners Bill & Ted move into a new location: Bill: Whoa, dude, somebody (previous tenant) left a safe here! Jeez, it's big . . . is it open? Ted: No. Bill: Can we find the combination? Maybe . . . Let's see if we can hook up with the last tenant, maybe they'll tell us. Ted: I found out who they were; but nobody remembers the numbers . . . shit. or I found the old owners. Someone gave me some numbers, but they don't work . . . shit. Possible Reasons: The numbers are wrong The correct dialing sequence is unknown (it can vary). The numbers might be right but the lock is broken. or Can't find the previous owner; nobody knows where they went to. Bill: Well, even if we can't use it, I want to see if anything's inside. ...

Ken Dunckel Safecracker Safe & Vault Service in SF Bay Area and Northern California 415-203-7298 kendunckel@aol.com Note: Don't know what happened, this one was already posted and got taken down by mistake. Here it is again, for what it's worth. This one is purely anecdotal, no helpful how-to or anything like that in here, and I suppose you could sum it up with "Much Ado About Nothing." Recently I did what has so far been the dumbest job of the year for me. Two years ago I installed a high security combination lock on a room door for a well-known Bay Area corporation. Did I already say “well-known?” Their CEO is among the richest people on the planet, and the company’s name is legend. All of which might lead one to conclude there are no dummies in their upper echelons. But wait, there’s more . . . Two years earlier my job was to remove an identical existing lock and install a replacement they supplied. The lock in question is a high security, high ...

By Ken Dunckel Owner, Safecracker Safe and Vault Opening & Repair San Francisco Bay Area nd Northern California CA License 1985 CA Contractor 553337 415-203-7298 kendunckel@aol.com The following suggestions can prevent safe problems and unnecessary expense. Don't spin the dial when locking or before opening. This is the same as spinning your tires every time you leave the curb. It doesn't "clear" anything or get the lock "in the mood." Dial spinning does increase the chance for breakage/malfunction, and it makes the lock wear faster. Don't pressure the handle that moves the bolts until the lock is open. Lots of users put hand pressure on safe handles as they work the lock. Doing so increases the chances for binds, stresses the locks. With time and repetition, this can create some really strange problems. When locking, don't touch or pressure the handle that moves the bolts until the door is fully closed and the ...

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...