Terribly Installed Factory Safe Lock

[tarboxb]

So I went over my buddy's house to try to crack his safe and had an extremely difficult time finding contact points. When I rotated the dial sharply to the right past 0, I could hear something around 98 but that was about it. I was unable to hear anything at all when rotating the other direction. I also noted to my friend that the lock seemed to have a loose spline key. Due to our confusion, we decided to have a look at the lock. It turns out that it was a LaGard 1548 (Chinese LaGard) and it was extremely poorly installed. First of all, the lack of contact points was due to an extremely out of round wheel which caused the fence to actually lift so high at times that the lever nose wouldn't even drop into the drive cam gate. Interestingly enough, this only really happened right around where I was parking the wheels when looking for the contact points. I also noticed that tilting the dial toward the lever made the contact points detectable. In the future, I will always try different parking positions when looking for contact points and experiment with pushing the dial around to try to find them. Anyway, onto the pictures... You can see that whoever installed this lock did an extremely poor job of it. This thing was a ticking lock out time bomb off the showroom floor. The spindle was cut so short that only about two threads were holding it into the drive cam and the spline key was down INSIDE the drive cam tapped hole. As could be expected, everything was extremely loose. I explained the problem to my friend and the extremely high probability of lock out and due to the low quality of the lock and too short spindle, we ended up just putting it a new S&G 6730 with the chrome spy proof dial. The safe is happy now and working better than ever! This safe cost nearly $2000 and was obviously NOT of a high quality. They were too cheap to install an American lock and they did not even install the lock correctly. The one positive was that my friend gave me the 1548, dial, and ring for my help so I am going to mount it up to something a bit thinner which will let me utilize the spindle at its current length and have a go at it. The incredible wheelpack inaccuracy is truly baffling to me.

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[bitbuster]

What brand of safe and where was it bought?

[tarboxb]

It was an Eastern Security Safe Company Sportsman 40 purchased in West Springfield, MA. Obviously this is probably not a common problem but this a serious problem to be sure!

[MartinHewitt]

Sounds like a ripoff from the baking tray mafia. (Sorry, German inside joke.)

PS: There was a German safe company which said to a German TV channel, that all other companies manufacture rubbish, that they are the "Kuchenblechmafia" (baking tray (sheet) mafia). They made for this TV channel a demonstration how quickly they get open a safe from a competitor. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVhYhLQ4Y64) They always say, that the safe is as good as open, after over five ours the TV team leaves the site. The last comment from the speaker is: "One thing is clear. The safes of the competitors are made from baking tray sheet and in principle within seconds open, at least for experts like the men from this company."

[tarboxb]

I watched the video. I laughed when the guy started kicking it!