safecracker at large

Making Sense of Safe Signage and  Labels What does it all mean? When someone calls a safe company about solving a safe lockout, the first thing the safe company needs to know is the safe maker's name. After that, model, rating, and a small handful of other questions arise. In the Bad Old (pre-phone camera and texting) Days, this meant a protracted Question/Answer session that usually left one or both parties frustrated and annoyed. Nowadays, safe techs who have experienced the exquisite anguish of the safe and vault Question/Answer Game have come to regard texted digital photos as huge timesavers.     Painted maker names, cities, etc. if the maker's name is painted on, it will usually be painted on the door. The names that so often appear on the frame over the door are (usually) not safe makers' names. Back in The Day it was a standard frill on the purchase to offer safes personalized with owners' names. Some older units were

Break-in Blues   This happened a while ago, but it stands out in my mind as a shining example of, well, I don't know exactly what, but here it is. . .   One fine San Francisco morning, a safe company in SF subcontracted me to hurry over to a well- known bar after a break-in. As often happens, the burglars' forcible safe-opening attempt hadn't gone well. The damage they did to the safe made it unopenable by normal means. It was obvious that the burglars hadn't known the first practical thing about forcibly opening even a lightweight box.   The other part of their misfortune was that the object of their attention happened to be a lot mor e than a lightweight box. They had tangled with a Hermann round door chest. This was a made-in-San Francisco burglary resistive chest. Its main claim to fame was, "never successfully burglariz