.:: Keypicking :: Anything And Everything For Locksmiths, Hobbyist Lock Pickers, Locksport, Lock Picking, lockpicks, cutaways and Security. Simply The Best Lockpicking Forum Around!

I have a Herring-Hall-Marvin safe which I'd like to attempt to open by manipulation (with no prior experience). It looks like this:



I've happened upon someone in New Zealand who blogged about opening a very similar-looking safe but he lucked out and the combination was basically marked on his dial.

But, from the few surviving photos on this blog, it looks like his safe had a different dial from mine. I'm wondering if anyone can tell me about this one.



Thanks!

S&G 6730. If not, then S&G R6770.

If you want to learn manipulation I would start with femurat's tutorial on here. Oldfast also has a lot of very useful information in his "Safe Chronicles." Keep in mind that those are more of manipulation logs than tutorials. You can learn a TON from them, but it will be difficult if you don't at least have a basic understanding on how manipulation works. Depending on how mechanically inclined you are, it seriously may be worth purchasing a safe lock for you to mount up to practice which allows you to see inside, etc. to gain a better understanding of what is happening at any given time. This is of course not entirely necessary if you can study a few pictures, videos, etc. and get a good understanding, after all you do have a safe sitting there waiting to be opened! I am still quite new to safe manipulation. I have only been doing it for a few months now but have been cracking quite a few and learning a ton. I obviously still have MANY more tons to learn but would be glad to give you some advise if you have any questions.

Brandan

Thanks to you both. I did remove another S&G lock mechanism from an opened safe of mine for some practice, and in that one I can find the contact region very easily. On the real target, I think I can find the right contact point at 15 but the left contact point is harder to tell—7 maybe? But I've spent 10 minutes tapping back and forth trying to confirm and I can't quite put my finger on it.

No problem John Locked. It sounds like you are already well on your way then! I have seen where some locks can have the wheels and drive cam in such a way that occasionally the fence will hit the wheels before the lever nose touches the drivecam. What happens is that the lever is lifted above the cam so you may not feel one or any of the contact points. Try to tilt the dial a bit and see if that helps, also move the wheels to different places when you check for CPs. For example, park them all at 25, 50, 75, 0, etc. Sometimes this phenomenon will happen when they are at one or some points and not others. In the extremely unlikely scenario that nothing gives you contact points, the next thing would be to focus on trying to find places where the fence may be indicating gates on the wheels by simply rotating all the wheels together and feeling for snags, etc. It may take some work but if you are able to ID a gate this way, hopefully you will then get contact point readings when that gate is under the fence.

I think wear can also cause this .

Also, it is rather unlikely but hypothetically lets say you do not get contact readings when the wheels are positioned anywhere but from R52 to R55 or so, that likely means there is an oversize wheel preventing the lever from going into the drive cam gate unless the gate of that wheel is aligned. I would bet in a circumstance like this that it is extremely likely that one of the numbers is R54. Then you can manipulate the different wheels to try to determine which it is on using high/low tests like femurat talks about to determine which wheel it is. Once you have that gate, the contact points should ready normally. It is worth mentioning that a phenomenon referred to as wheel float can occur which can cause quite a bit of variation between the positions of the wheels on the wheel post inside the lock depending on rotation direction when positioning wheels. This is due to play between the wheel hole and wheel post. Oldfast came to the conclusion, and it works well for me that dialing every number of test combinations from the direction which you initially got the indication is a good method to significantly improve the clarity of the high/low test. Also, due to this wheel float as well as subtle differences in the alignment of the the wheels themselves relative to each other when changing dialing directions, sometimes this is all that is necessary to get indications when they were being stubborn before.

One other thing I thought I should mention, of course there are variations and tolerances, etc. but my 6730 has a contact area from about 4 to 12. Yours being from 7 to 15 is identical, just shifted three numbers. This does seem highly likely. My buddy has a 6730 with the contact area shifted the other way between like 2 and 10 or something.