SAFE & VAULT A Job of Surprises Figure 10. The lock is shown just after removal. to liſt each lever up and down individu- ally, starting with the lever nearest to you. You can see the lever’s “gate” (or gap in the lever, if you prefer) with a scope and feel it with a screwdriver. After you insert a thin screwdriver through the first lever gate, keep the screwdriver in the gate and proceed us- ing the same technique until you have aligned all the levers in the lock using your thin screwdriver. At the same time, keep all previous levers in position as your screwdriver goes deeper into the levers. Once aligned, keep a hold of the levers with the screwdriver while putting turn- ing pressure on the lock bolt with your lock pick or similar tool, and then move the lock bolt into the open position. If you have correctly aligned the lever’s gates, the lock will open. If not, you may need to jiggle your screwdriver until it does open. Back to the Job Going back to our safe, once the lock was opened, turning the handle opened the safe door to reveal the contents that 30 KEYNOTES FEBRUARY 2021 Figure 11. This photo shows the drilled lock. you can see in the photo. I won’t tell you what was in the tin, but I bet you can guess! Aſter removing the back chamber of the safe door, I noticed that the lock had been signed on 15/10/96, (22 years previ- ously) by the engineer who had opened the safe. I have blurred the signature to protect the guilty, as it were. I suspect it was one of those bad day jobs, but you know who you are. I must admit, I wouldn’t have signed it if it were me, though! We had one of our replacement 10-lever Chatwood Double Bitted safe locks with us with two keys to save time. This meant that when we removed the drilled lock, we were able to immediately swap it rather than have to either cut keys on site (a real pain with these locks; allow one or two hours) or take it back to the workshop, cut the keys (still about an hour) and then come back to the site. Sadly, the levers in the removed lock were so badly damaged that they were not fit to repair. We had to scrap the lock rather than rekey it at our leisure for the next time we need one. This was annoy- ing, because they are becoming quite rare nowadays, but I suppose you can’t have an easy opening and a decent lock to rekey on the same day. That would be too much to ask for. We filled the hole with a couple of tight-fitting ball bearings and metal filler once we had fully tested the safe. It took about 20 minutes to find the site foreman, who was eventually located in the roof space. We had him test the lock and handed over the new safe keys. Aſter he signed my job sheet, we carried all our tools to the van. At this point, we discovered that somebody had parked his van blocking our path to exit from the car park (well, technically they had blocked everyone’s exit). What a shame, I thought, or words to that effect. The van had a Polish registration mark, so I set off looking for the driver of the unmarked white van in one direc- tion, and Mark set off in another direc- tion. Did I mention that this was a very large pub? Twenty minutes later, we met WWW.ALOA.ORG
