Hatton Gardens

[Doug MacQueen]

Lightweight as in relation to... a 2 meter wall. If it was a 6 inch wall I would have called the door heavy.

[Tom Gordon]

It must have been a bit frustrating for them to presumably have to leave after only having opened a few boxes....

[Chubby]

How thick are those treasury doors? Are they 9"? That is a fair old slab of material- I wouldn't call it a lightweight.

I suppose that when it was installed in the forties the owners got whatever their insurers specified.

The point is that any installation can resist only a certain amount of attack. We are looking at a wall which is 70 years old so the tooling used just didn't exist when it was built. If attackers can have undisturbed access to a wall with state of the art tools for a prolonged period of time then they are going to get through it. All you are doing with a vault wall is buying time.

Certainly if my premium bond certificates and my Woolworths watch were stored in a vault of that quality this latest successful attack would not cause me any sleepless nights. Of course I would have the alarm switched to the "on" position with a security company of known standing monitoring it and providing guards if there was a problem.

[wylk]

It must have been a bit frustrating for them to presumably have to leave after only having opened a few boxes....

Which raises a question: after getting into the vault, exactly how did they attack the individual boxes? There are a few ways that have been publicly documented in other cases. One of the main requirements (usually) is that the method should be quick. The small number of attacked boxes at Hatton Garden may indicate they ran out of time but some news articles speculate they had specific targets.

[Chubby]

Which raises a question: after getting into the vault, exactly how did they attack the individual boxes? There are a few ways that have been publicly documented in other cases. One of the main requirements (usually) is that the method should be quick. The small number of attacked boxes at Hatton Garden may indicate they ran out of time but some news articles speculate they had specific targets.

If it were later to be proved that there had been inside help there is the chance that the bad guys knew exactly which boxes would be the best to hit.

If they got through a wall as substantial as that one I can't imagine safe deposit boxes creating much of a problem!

[Doug MacQueen]

Here is an example of 1892 state of the art safe drilling capability. 4" hole saw through laminated plate door, average time about 2 hours. According to one patent I read, diamond was being used in the later 1800's in drilling safes. I don't know if they were using diamond to go through the hardened plates in this picture, but it is possible. As this was 50 years before that Chubb vault was installed, I would say the tooling in the 1940's was definitely up to the task. Only difference is today you have a youtube video to show you how to do it.

[Chubby]

Diamond tipped cutting equipment has certainly been around for a very long time. Modern drills, though, are far more sophisticated and powerful than earlier ones- at least pound for pound. I don't doubt that drills upto that job existed in mining or quarrying 70 years ago but I doubt if 3 men and a wheelie bin would have been sufficient to move them, surreptitiously, onto the site.

[Huw Eastwood]

That's an interesting picture that Doug posted. The heavy engineers ratchet brace is a pretty lost and forgotten bit of kit these days. Mention ratchet brace and everyone thinks of the lightweight carpenters tool, but a heavy engineers rig modified like that gives some serious push to it. Last time I saw one being used was for drilling out stays up inside the inner firebox of a locomotive boiler, a rarely encountered bit of kit, but something that still has its place even today for certain jobs.

The photo and topic will strike a note with anyone who has the 1968 'Chubb Collectanea' book. There's good references to some of the big attacks on British safes, and similar to the attack that Doug has pictured. Although I think they were a fair bit later though, probably 1900—20s.

Most cases were badly reported by the press- it turned out the 10 inch holes reportedly cut with ease through 7 inch thick solid steel safes, actually turned out to be 4 inch holes cut through the thin walls of fire resisting safes. If I remember right it was down to Ratner's in the end to set the record straight and tell the public how it really was.

If the safe in the picture is a jewellers or bankers quality then I'm impressed. Seriously impressed! But although it looks an impressive safe I haven't a clue as to what it is or what sort of materials and thicknesses would be in the door and body. Anyone who's broke a sweat on a big old Chatwood, Hobb's, Chubb, Milner etc, jammed in a tight corner with only a couple of foot of space, wedged on a stone floor and struggling to drill through their toughest hard plate knows that a quarter inch hole with modern tools can still be hard work. A four inch diameter hole without power and entirely by hand I can only imagine!

Its also got me thinking about the drill bits and hole saws they'd have had available back then. I know that tungsten carbide was stumbled on by Osram the light bulb makers in the 1920s, and was developed further and marketed a few years later by Krupps. Like already mentioned, diamond tooling has been around a long time, and it was to replace diamond coatings on drawing dies that led Osram to their discovery. Since they were already using diamond coatings of a sort, they must have had a way of fixing or coating steel tools with it. I can't think how though, as nowadays it's done with so many modern fusion processes which definitely weren't available back then. Tungsten carbide is easy in comparison, and something I've brazed onto tools myself in order to make one-off drills for safe work and unusual face cutters for machining.

The age old diamond cutting trade doesn't throw much light on it either, as it's mostly done by lapping using pastes on cast iron rather than 'fixed' or rigid diamonds like on cutting tools. One things for sure, they must have had a way around it and some seriously tough cutting edges to penetrate hard plates with arm power like that, and at a time when manufacturers were really starting to make them tough.

[Chubby]

I gave my copy away but that Chubb book was full of interesting stuff.

I think it was Ratner who eventually paid for space in newspapers to dispel the myths perpetrated by "journalists" just repeating any old guff. The reports spoke about the thieves breaking into bankers' quality safes and removing the fire resisting material which sort of gave the game away to anybody who knew anything about the subject. These were, actually, fire safes which were being used for risks for which they had never been designed. The criminals were using hole saws and to get extra torque were turning them with a car steering wheel. (In those days a steering wheel was more formidable than a modern one as there was no power steering and the driver did all the work).

[Doug MacQueen]

That drill rig was being used on bankers chests made by Hall, Diebold, Herring and a couple others. It was definitely a hole saw as you could see the discs cut out in a couple pictures. I admit that when I first saw that picture I was blown away. The point being is that ever since the sectional jimmy and "jack in the box", safecrackers have adapted, altered and manufactured equipment for the job at hand. As Max has pointed out, he can make a special carbide tipped drill when needed. If I had to drill a couple of feet of concrete, why would I use a rig capable of drilling hundreds of feet? Of course I wouldn't, I would make the tool fit the job. The big prize vs. big hurt gamble can result in some pretty creative thinking.