Uncategorized

Yesterday we spoke about talking safes. Now we seem to have a safe that looks very unhappy.

I must confess I had no idea what Pareidolia meant. But a friendly lady taking pictures of a safe with a hole drilled in it was kind enough to explain.

She showed on her phone an endless series of images of everyday objects, like a slice of bread or cucumber. All these images had one thing in common: the structure of the object was not altered but still shaped in a way to clearly show a face. And that basically is what Pareidolia is: seeing (or hearing) shapes in objects that were not purposely designed with that in mind.

Once she noticed one face somewhere, she started to notice them everywhere. Including in this poor drilled safe. And now I see them too.

You might know by now that WSS exists to open locks with no damage, or as little damage as possible. Whether picking or manipulating, we like to say that locks are talking to us, telling us how they would like to be opened. As you can imagine, we are used to listening carefully to what locks have to say.

Unfortunately our customers sometimes do not get the subtle or less subtle clues the lock is giving them. Like the owner of this nice CHUBB LIPS safe. The customer was having trouble with the keypad for some time. It was getting harder and harder entering the correct code. Until the moment it was no longer possible to enter the code.

When we arrived we opened the safe and discovered the keypad cable was the problem. There was a lot of stress on the cable and over time it got more and more damaged. Finally one internal wire in the cable broke, causing the signals from the keypad never reaching the lock inside the safe.

We still found a way to open it without damage to the safe. After installing some new components the safe is as good as new and ready for many years of use.

It pays off to having more then one key to your safe. In this case the owner had one key left to open his safe. For years this went well until the key got lost. As always the timing was not good. We managed to open this Dudley Windsor safe without any damage to the safe or lock.

We swapped the lock and serviced the door. This high quality safe is good to go for many more years.

Lesson of the day: It is better to invest 50 euro on a key duplicate instead of paying 15 times more to have your safe opened.