Safe Opening in Mountain View

Safes stop for a small number of reasons and each has its own route in. The combination was never written down, or the person who knew it is no longer around. The electronic keypad has gone quiet, which is nearly always corroded battery contacts or a broken ribbon between the pad and the lock body. The bolt work has jammed, usually after the safe was moved. Or a relocker has fired, which is the safe doing exactly what it was built to do.

The quiet methods come first and each gets its time. A dial is manipulated by feel on the wheel pack, and that can run an hour or more. That hour is worth spending, because a safe opened without a hole is still worth what you paid for it. When feel runs out, an instrument decodes the wheels. A keypad that lights up and beeps while the bolts stay put is telling you the code and the pad are both fine and the fault is behind them, usually a solenoid that has stopped pulling, and that generally opens without drilling at all.

If a drill really is what remains, you hear it first and you decide. The bit goes where the manufacturer's drawing puts it for that model, clear of the glass plate that would fire the relocker. The hole is closed afterward with a hardened plug, the lock is repaired or replaced, and the position is written on the receipt for whoever opens it next. A drilled safe that is properly plugged goes back to work.

This covers closet safes in apartments, gun safes in garages on the older streets, drop safes under a counter on Castro Street, and office safes in the units out by the bay. A safe bolted into a closet floor stays bolted, since nothing has to be moved or turned over to be opened. Ownership is settled before anything begins and it takes a minute: an ID with the closing statement for a safe that came with a place, an executor letter or a page of a trust for one that came by inheritance, or a lease and a named person present for one in a business.

Safe opening is $212 to $559 with the $89 visit inside. A failed keypad or a simple electronic lockout is $212. Manipulating a mid-size dial is the middle. Drilling and properly repairing a high-security lock or a heavy gun safe reaches $559. Between 8pm and midnight add $52, making the $212 job $264, and overnight add $92, making it $304. The call gives you a range and the exact figure is fixed with the safe in view. From that point it does not move, and a drill is not a reason for it to. Once open, you set a new number yourself and the door is closed and opened several times before anything goes back inside it.