What I do on vacation …

It has been a little slow with my weblog. Maybe it’s because I now use twitter to burst short messages instead of blogging, but the silence here does not mean nothing is happening. On the contrary, a lot is happening….

combination safe lock manipulation minor difference

First there was the safe opening weekend. I am sorry to be repetitive, but the weekend was a great success. Julian picked open four safes, amongst them yet another couple of real monsters , and lots and lots of other safes were opened in more destructive ways. I really was eager to try to open a safe by manipulating a combination lock, but failed as the only lock around was a four wheel lips lock. I am by now reasonably experienced in opening three wheel ‘group two’ locks, but this four wheel lips lock was just a little too much for me. We ended up drilling a hole in the safe and using a scope to read the combination.

I like a challenge and am using the vacation I am in now to study the four wheel lock(s). Jord Knaap was kind enough to let me use one of his cut-away demo locks for this research/test. The lock is neatly mounted on a stand, and as Jord had an eye for details, he even included the anti-drill ‘hard plate’ on the stand (it’s the yellow layer between the dial and the house of the lock). The interesting part is that these locks have false cuts in their wheels, and the position of the false cuts seems to be different on some wheels. Maybe there is a pattern, but it is too early to say … It’s just the first day of my holiday today 😉

false cuts on four wheel safe combination lock to make manipulation more difficult

Behind the scenes we are busy preparing lockcon (October 8-9-10). It’s gonna be good as more and more people from all over the globe are attracted to it, and the presentations will be high quality as always. And I will use this two week vacation to reply to some mails people have send me. I am running a little behind but will be back on track before the holiday is over …

2 Responses to “What I do on vacation …”

  1. Elphreaker says:

    Nice one Barry! If flight weight allows, ill take a combination safe lock that you will probably like!

  2. NKT says:

    Ah, the issue with Twitter is that it all just gets lost in the noise that is twittering!

    Also, there’s no pictures in line with the text, and getting a decent idea over in 140 characters? Might it be worth taking the tweets and forming them into a few posts for here?