About 10 or 15 years ago I read a description in Playboy (I think) of a mechnical device which opened safes. It attached to the front of the safe, a shaft was connected to the dial, and it would literally try every possible number combination until it opened. It spun fast enough that the manufacturer claimed it could, running continuously, open any safe in no more than a week. It also said its sale would obviously be restricted. I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen, but I’ve never heard of it since. Anyone know if the thing really existed?
Don’t know, but I remember it was a big thing on several episodes of Mission Impossible decades ago! That Barney (Greg Morris), what a guy!
About 8 years ago on alt.locksmith, I heard a guy describe such a device. At the time, I thought it was his own invention, and I thought it was pretty clever. I didn’t know something like that was commercially available. I’ve never seen one in locksmith catalogs. I’m looking at the latest Clark’s security catalog (a big place in So California), and there’s no mention.
Here’s one such device for opening combination locks.
That is so cool.
Yes I have used an Autodialer. Lockmasters a company based in Nicholasville Ky sells them at around 2K a pop to certified locksmiths. I believe the average time for that machine with no known combo is 24-36 hours.
There is a new device now sold the MBA associates that is nto an autodialer but an auto manipulator. Which can open Group 2 (more common safe locks) in approx 30 to 45 minutes.
Keep in mind there are two kinds of mechanical locks on safes group 1 and group 2 type locks. An auto dialer works on group 2 but unless there is serious modifications will not work on a group 1 type lock.
Group two locks are used mainly in commercial and residential safes.
Group one locks are what you find on most goverment containers.
I could go into more detail about the differences between the two but that is for another thread at another time.
Good day,
Osip
Ah, just use a magnesium torch. Presto.
While Richard Feynmann was working on the Manhattan Project, he took up safecracking as a hobby. He determined that he could open any safe on the premesis by trying all combinations in a maximum of eight hours, and these were the safes used to hold our nation’s most sensitive Top Top Secret information. Of course, he used a few tricks to make it quicker, too.
I don’t know if Feynman’s 8 hours would suffice today. Let’s look at a simple, cheap masterlock, shall we? With forty numbers, each available for any of the three numbers used in the combination, you have 64,000 possible combinations. Even at one combination a second (impossible), it would take you nearly 18 hours…
ya know, it occurred to me, what good is opening the safe if the machine doesn’t make a record of what the actual combination IS? I know you want to get at the contents, but the safe is still useless for future use without a combination. I suppose once the safe is open, there is some way to open the guts and get the combination settings?
The thing there is that he determined he could be one number off in any direction and it wouldn’t matter, thus greatly cutting down the number of combinations.
IANAE.
But…
Most safes I have seen have an access panel inside. When you remove the panel, you can either reset the lock to a new combination or replace the mechanism entirely, depending on what you need to do. On some types of safe (exactly which kinds I don’t know, except we had one in my workplace) if you screw up while resetting the combo, you have to get a locksmith in to sort things out. I presume this means that it’s possible to accidentally reset the combo to something you didn’t intend (and have no clear way of knowing). Only a trained locksmith can help you then.
~~Baloo
Osip-
Got any URLs explaining the more detailed workings of safes & locks (group 1 vs. 2 etc.)?