Safes and Vaults
Combination and electronic locks, what the UL and RSC ratings actually promise, manipulation, drilling and safe moving done without hurting anybody.
Ratings and What They Promise
Safe marketing is close to meaningless without the ratings behind it. The word fireproof is not a rating. The word burglary resistant is not a rating. Learn the small number of real labels and you can tell a customer in thirty seconds whether the safe they bought does what they think it does.
- RSC means five minutes against one attacker with hand tools. TL 15 means fifteen against a skilled one.
- The x6 suffix means all six sides were tested, not just the door.
- Class 350 protects paper. Digital media needs class 125.
- Anchor the safe. An unanchored container gets carried away and opened elsewhere.
Burglary ratings
Residential Security Container, usually written RSC, is the entry level burglary rating. It means the container resisted a single attacker with hand tools for five minutes. That is genuinely useful against an opportunist and close to useless against a determined attack.
Above that sit the Underwriters Laboratories tool resistant ratings. TL 15 means fifteen minutes of net working time against a skilled attacker with hand and power tools on the door. TL 30 means thirty. Adding x6 means all six sides were tested rather than only the door, which matters enormously because many safes have thin sides.
Quote the time out loud. A customer who thinks their safe is impregnable and actually owns a five minute container is a customer who leaves it unbolted in a spare room. The number changes their behaviour more than any advice you give.
Fire ratings
Fire ratings are a time and a temperature. A one hour class 350 rating means the interior stayed below three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit for one hour in a furnace test. That threshold protects paper, because paper chars around four hundred and five degrees.
Digital media needs far more protection. Class 125 keeps the interior below one hundred and twenty five degrees and controls humidity, because a hard drive or a memory card fails long before paper does. A safe rated for documents will not save a backup drive.
Fire safes also usually work by holding moisture in an insulating layer that releases as steam. That steam protects the contents from heat and can soak them. Tell customers to bag anything moisture sensitive inside the safe, and never to store a fire safe where it can be reached by standing water.
Fire and burglary are different problems
The two requirements pull in opposite directions. Fire protection wants thick insulating material that is light and porous. Burglary protection wants dense steel and concrete composite. A cheap safe that claims both usually delivers a good fire rating and an RSC or nothing on burglary.
Say so plainly. If the customer's real worry is a house fire destroying documents, a good fire safe bolted down is the right purchase. If the real worry is a burglar taking a coin collection, a TL rated container is, and it will be heavy and expensive.
And bolt it down either way. An unanchored safe under a hundred and fifty pounds walks out of the house in a burglar's arms and gets opened at leisure. Anchoring is the cheapest security upgrade in the entire trade.
Locks on Safes
Safe locks fall into two families. Mechanical combination locks turn wheels behind the dial. Electronic locks read a keypad and drive a solenoid or motor. Both are genuinely secure when specified properly and both fail in ways you should be able to diagnose over the phone.
- Four left, three right, two left, then right to open. Skipping a revolution leaves a wheel unpicked.
- A dead battery never erases an electronic combination. It only stops the motor.
- Repeated wrong entries trigger a penalty lockout that gets longer if you keep trying.
- A key override is often the weakest part of a consumer safe. Store the key elsewhere.
Mechanical combination locks
Behind the dial sits a stack of wheels, usually three, each with a notch called a gate. Dialling the combination rotates each wheel until its gate lines up. When all gates align they form a slot, the fence on the lever drops into it, and the bolt can retract.
Dialling direction and the number of revolutions matter because each wheel is picked up by the one before it. That is why the standard procedure is four turns left to the first number, three right to the second, two left to the third, then right until the bolt retracts. Skipping a revolution leaves a wheel unpicked.
The most common service call is not a broken lock. It is a customer dialling past a number and continuing rather than starting over. Talk them through a clean redial before you dispatch. It resolves a surprising share of calls at no cost to anybody.
Electronic safe locks
An electronic lock stores the combination in non volatile memory, so a dead battery loses the time of day but never the combination. When a customer says the battery died and it wiped my code, the code is still there. The battery simply cannot drive the bolt motor.
Most units live on one nine volt battery in the keypad housing or in a tray below it. Replace it with a fresh alkaline, not a rechargeable and not a lithium unless the manufacturer specifies one, because the voltage curve matters to the motor drive.
Electronic locks also have a penalty lockout. Several wrong entries in a row trigger a delay of several minutes, and continuing to try extends it. Tell the customer to stop pressing and wait. Half of all electronic safe callouts are somebody fighting a penalty timer.
Redundant keys and key override
Many consumer safes include a key override so the safe can be opened without the combination. That is a convenience and a vulnerability at the same time, because the override cylinder is often a low grade tubular or wafer lock that is far easier to attack than the electronic lock beside it.
Commercial rated safes generally do not have an override, which is why losing a combination on one is a serious event requiring manipulation or drilling.
Advise customers to store override keys away from the safe, and to record the combination somewhere secure and offsite. The number of safes drilled every year because the only record was inside the safe is not small.
Opening a Safe
Safe opening is a specialty inside a specialty. It is slow, it is quiet work, and it rewards patience more than force. Most professional openings are done either by manipulation, by a scoped drill point, or by recovering the combination from records that everybody assumed were lost.
- Records, defaults and the override come before the drill, every time.
- Manipulation reads gate positions through dial resistance. Modern locks resist it deliberately.
- Hardplate and relockers punish a wrong drill point. Use the published diagram.
- Plug and refinish the hole and replace the lock. An unrepaired safe is not a safe.
Ask before you drill
Start with records. The manufacturer may hold the factory combination against the serial number, the dealer may have it, the previous owner may have it, and on a great many inherited safes it is written in a document nobody has looked at.
Then check the obvious. Try the factory default combination, commonly fifty twenty five twenty five or ten twenty thirty on many mechanical locks. Try the key override if there is one. Check whether the handle is simply seized rather than the lock being locked.
A safe opened by a phone call is a happy customer and a fifteen minute job. A safe drilled when a record existed is an expensive repair that did not need to happen.
Manipulation
Manipulation reads the lock through the dial. Tiny variations in resistance as the lever rides the wheel pack reveal where each gate sits, and the numbers are recovered one wheel at a time by charting contact points.
It is a real skill that takes months to develop and it works on a shrinking share of locks, because modern wheel packs use nylon wheels and anti manipulation lever designs specifically to defeat it.
It is still worth learning, partly because it opens safes without damage and partly because it teaches you what a wheel pack is doing better than any amount of reading. Practise on a lock mounted to a board rather than on a customer's safe.
Drilling and repair
Professional drilling is not violence. It is a single small hole in a precisely located place, made so a borescope can see the wheel gates or the bolt mechanism directly. Manufacturers publish drill point diagrams to licensed locksmiths for exactly this purpose.
Hardplate and relockers are what make it skilled work. A hardplate is a layer of case hardened or carbide embedded steel over the lock area. A relocker is a spring loaded device that fires and permanently jams the bolt work if the lock is punched or the plate is breached in the wrong place. Hitting a relocker turns a two hour job into a cutting job.
Always repair the hole afterwards. Plug it, weld or fill as appropriate, refinish it, and replace the lock. A safe left with an open drill hole is no longer a safe, and leaving it that way is the mark of somebody who will not be called again.
Moving Safes Safely
More locksmiths are injured moving safes than doing anything else in the trade. A gun safe is commonly seven hundred pounds and a small commercial TL rated safe can exceed two thousand. Weight that will not hurt you standing still will absolutely hurt you tipping over.
- Walk the whole route and measure before touching the safe.
- Transitions are where safes fall. Slow down, stay strapped, nobody downhill on stairs.
- Removing the door can take away a third of the weight and improve the balance.
- Anchor by default, and hand oversized jobs to a rigging company.
Plan the route before you touch it
Walk the entire path first. Measure doorways, check the turn at the bottom of the stairs, look at the floor surface, and find out what is underneath the floor you are rolling across. A safe on a dolly concentrates its whole weight onto a few square inches.
Ask about the structure. A thousand pound safe on a second floor of a timber framed house is a structural question, not a locksmith question, and the answer sometimes involves an engineer.
Decide where it will finally sit before you start moving it, and confirm the customer agrees. Repositioning a safe twice is how backs get hurt.
Equipment and technique
Use a proper safe jack, machinery skates, a stair climbing dolly and straps rated for the load. Do not improvise with an appliance dolly and enthusiasm.
Keep the safe low and keep it strapped. The dangerous moment is always the transition, going over a threshold, off a truck lift gate, or onto a stair. Slow down at every transition and never let anybody stand downhill of a safe on stairs.
Empty the safe first if the contents allow it and remove the door where the design permits, because the door is often a third of the total weight and removing it also moves the centre of gravity back where you want it.
Anchoring and knowing when to refuse
Once placed, anchor it. Through the floor into a joist or a slab, using the manufacturer's anchor holes and the correct fastener for the material. Concrete takes a wedge anchor, timber takes a lag bolt into structure rather than into subfloor.
Anchoring is not optional on any safe a person could tip or carry, and it is the recommendation customers ignore most often. Include it in the quote by default rather than as an extra so it does not get declined on price.
And refuse the jobs that are beyond your equipment. Rigging companies exist. Handing a job to one is cheaper than a crushed foot, a broken staircase or a safe through a floor.
Looking to hire rather than learn?
Browse locksmiths by city, or call and we will point you at one nearby.
Browse by city