Dual safe cracking weekend …

Yesterday I finally collected my MacBook pro. While I am still busy installing software on it, I could not resist to try out the video editing software. First attempt can be found here (Quicktime 15 MB).

safe cracking weekend

And a couple of weeks ago Paul Crouwel and Rob Zomer organized a safe cracking weekend. People from all over the globe gathered at this ‘invitation only’ party to share knowledge on the holy grail of safe cracking. Some pretty serious safes were cracked by the attendees (like a GJ Arnheim, Rosengrens European, LIPS VS 80, Victor (build in +- 1910) a LIPS VAGO and so on).

Paul used this weekend to try out some of his new tools. Amongst them were some strongarm hardplate drill-bits, a mini drill rig that allows you to apply perfect drill tension and an ITL2000 safe combination dialing robot.

Especially the mini drill rig and strongarm drill bits came out real well. Before they got the drill rig, a more primitive (yet effective!) method of applying pressure to a drill was used.

One other tool that was used was a thermic lance. Pretty spectacular to see (and smell) in real life. (click on image to see quicktime video 18 MB, or here for youtube)

thermic lance cutting trough safe armoured material

A lot of interesting discoveries were made over the weekend and we are currently working on an article for the Savta magazine to list some of them.

For us the biggest surprise was to find one of the safes still was filled with jewelry! Fortunately the owner of the safe was present and was happy to receive his goods back undamaged.

Just a few kilometers away from our party some other safe owner was much more unhappy. A jewelry shop in a black market hall was burglarized, and some extreme brute force was used. The thieves must have used a pretty hefty grinding wheel (diamond blade?) to cut a hole in the side of the safe. The sad thing was no insurance company could be found to insure the poor entrepreneur because of the location of the market. And the security guards responsible for the place received multiple alarm calls but never bothered to thoroughly investigate why the silent alarm kept going off. Very fishy if you ask me …

A news item (including Rob Zomer’s expertise) can be found here (Quicktime 15 MB) or on youtube.

It is a good thing all 15 of the ‘safe cracking weekend’ attendees have a solid alibi…

P.s. I am curious if you think quicktime video is prefered over my old Windows Media files …

10 Responses to “Dual safe cracking weekend …”

  1. Floor says:

    Nice to see an update!
    Yet another collection of really cool tools.

    P.S.
    I prefer almost anything over Windows Media files (The quality/file size with the Quicktime H.264 codec seems to be good).

  2. Thank you Barry for the shift from WMV to anything other. WMV is propritary video format, and as there is no legal codecs available for Linux, I’m very happy for those MOV-files 🙂

    That autodialer looks pretty neat, is that a chuck from a lathe that holds the motor to the dial? 😀 Pretty neat idea.

  3. Hi!

    My VLC-Videoplayer (http://www.videolan.org/) plays kluizenkraak.mov nicely, but not lans.mov. Sometimes I see the first picture, sometimes a black screen with sound. Maybe it has something to do with the fact, that kluizenkraak.mov uses “mp4a” as codec, lans.mov “araw”.
    Maybe you publish your vidoes in a non-proprietar format like xvid or plain MPEG-2?

    André

  4. Barry says:

    Thanks for your comments! So far no angry windows users 😉

    Floor:
    Thanks for the codec comments, and I am really getting in the mood for more postings.

    Jaakko:
    I am not sure if lathe parts are used, but I do know the dialer is an interesting and powerful tool. Unfortunately we did not manage to open the lock with it, because the device was configured wrong. But Paul now knows how to set it right.

    André:
    The truth is I edited the kluizenkraak video while the lans.mov was made by a photo camera with short video clip abilities. So I never touched the thermic lance video and just put it online.

    I am still looking into what to do with my video formats and will install the xvid and divx codecs and give them a try too….

  5. Francis says:

    Barry,
    The video codecs used by most digital camera are not very space sensitive and are usually chosen to work with the camera’s low processing power. You’d do better to encode it into mpeg 4, mpeg 4 is not proprietary at all. Mpeg 2 has huge file sizes by comparison and offers no quality enhancements.

  6. JackNco says:

    Interesting stuff. gotta feel sorry for the poor guy that got robbed though.

    As for the videos, any “angry windows users” that have troubles I would recommend VLC player. although one of the videos (http://blackbag.toool.nl/video/lans.mov) did stump it, but its the first time a mov file has failed for me in VLC.

    All the best

    John

  7. Just as a sidenote, both movies play fine with Kaffeine in Linux 🙂

  8. mercurial says:

    John has already suggested one good player for the Windows users amongst us, although he mentioned that the player didn’t like lans.mov

    Another option, for those using windows is a free media player called “Quicktime Alternative”. It is a very simple package, no fancy features, but its effective and its free. (just google it if you wish to try it)

    Quicktime Alternative had no probs playing lans.mov

    Mark

  9. […] – a human skill that is difficult for a machine to accomplish. You’d do a lot better drilling your way […]

  10. How Does one get an invitation?