Hatton Gardens

[Doug MacQueen]

Speaking of creative moments, Chubby you may appreciate this 3-in-1 pick I designed about 20 years ago, for the 6K174.

[Chubby]

What a lovely toy! I want one.

Speaking of creative moments, Chubby you may appreciate this 3-in-1 pick I designed about 20 years ago, for the 6K174.

[wylk]

A recent article plus video features reporter Declan Lawn exploring how quickly holes can be core drilled in concrete (20 minutes per hole) and how quickly safe deposit boxes can be broken open (40 seconds). Of course these experiments make for good entertainment but are hardly representative.

First, the experimental concrete was possibly low grade with little or no reinforcement or barrier material. It likely took longer to drill the actual vault but we don't know how much longer. At best, the video shows how it was done but not how difficult it really was.

Second, the boxes Declan breaks open are of a different design than the ones in Hatton Garden. We don't yet know how they were broken open and his experiment is largely entertainment.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32431557

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOmPqfNVJ9E

[Huw Eastwood]

Seeing the documentary to be aired on Sunday night made me think great, that'll be worth a look. But, having seen the reports and briefly watched the videos that it's going to be based on I think I'll give it a miss. Why they can't wait until they have more of the facts and research properly I'll never know, but that's journalism and the press I suppose. Like wylk said it's more for entertainment than anything else.

Doug that's a nice bit of kit there, Did you modify an impressioning gun for part of it, we had a blue one from the USA with a similar handle and trigger.

[Doug MacQueen]

You are close Max, that's a Curtis Key clipper that I modified. I was going to sell them and hand deliver anywhere in the world. Unfortunately the pin and cam picks came out at the same time so I dropped the idea and the pick just sits in a box. As you can see the dial indicator on the pick can also be used to decode if unsuccessful at tentative picking. A real bear to make but highly effective on that Chubb.

[Chubby]

[QUOTE=MaxVaultage;20459]Seeing the documentary to be aired on Sunday night made me think great, that'll be worth a look. But, having seen the reports and briefly watched the videos that it's going to be based on I think I'll give it a miss. Why they can't wait until they have more of the facts and research properly I'll never know, but that's journalism and the press I suppose. Like wylk said it's more for entertainment than anything else.

Journalists! Mmmmmmmmmm. There is an old saying: "Read a newspaper and you can generally believe the date".

[Huw Eastwood]

You're right Chubby, when I read it the date I thought of was the same as the one at the top of the screen! Ok Wrong terminology I admit but you get the idea, I would have expected far better from the bbc. Guess I must be getting old lol, policeman seem half my age, even the bbc's now going downhill and About 10 years ago I started saving wooden sticks for those unexpected paint stirring jobs...

Shame about those picks Doug. Nice work there and clear to see its a real precision tool. I probably know how it felt as I had several inventions and ideas which ended up collecting dust down to similar unknown but unlucky timing.

[safeman]

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.

I have attached some pictures of the French trepanning tool and 'le Pont' screwing tool.

I am surprised that your illustration shows an attack on the door surface as I would
have thought the body to have a lower resistance. Perhaps the interior was fitted with immovable shelves.

This illustration shows a Tann List 2A where the attempt to stitch-drill the lock with a ratchet drill has been disturbed.
The power of this drill rig was really necessary to overcome hardened plates but mainly to drill the larger diameter
holes for the attachment of devices such as the forcing screw or le Pont.

This device as used here would have been totally impractical as a burglary tool due to it's size and weight but was
in this instance used by one safe maker to discredit another.

The details are in my website 'safeman.org.uk' under the heading Unfair Tactics.

[Huw Eastwood]

Interesting stuff safeman, a visit to your site always involves a two hour time warp for me.

The Unfair Tactics section is an amazing read. I hope you can throw a bit more light on things- with these early attacks I'm still struggling to get my head around the actual cutting tools they were using. I can only guess that when it came to the manufacturers attacking each other's safes that their engineering departments had 'carte Blanche' open cheque books to develop their own cutting tools. Like Doug said it definitely breeds a lot of creative ingenuity and thinking outside of the box, but even with this considered it still seems to fall a bit short in some areas.

For me, I can't help thinking there was also a bit of mystical magic going on here and there. It seems Diamond bits were still huge clumsy tools with a huge surface area on the cutting edges until at least the 1920s, the technology and method of how the stones were fastened to the tool face being the limiting factor at the time. Useless for hand powered rigs no matter how much pressure they were applying. I can't see how they could have used the same principle for the types of slim cutters and devices we're being shown. Very hard steels and alloys for slim hole-saw type cutters and trepanning tools, yes, no problem, manufacturing was at that level, but such tools would only be On par with the hardness of the plates and barriers they were trying to cut.

Flame softening is a possibility, and mentioned on safeman' site, but it only works to a point and doesn't reduce heavy hard steel plate to butter softness throughout its entire thickness. It would be a slow and tedious addition to what's already involved. Possibly it explains the manufacturers competitive tests between each other, but certainly not practical for the crooks illegally attacking safes where time is critical along with the weight and amount of equipment being carried.

Also, and this is the big one, drilling the holes in hard material is one thing, but for a few of the devices and rigs they were using they also needed to then tap threads into the holes. On any of the hardened and so-called drill-proof safes like the Chatwood this seems like super-magic. To then apply the same cutting principle to a thread cutting tap in such hard alloys Seems even more distant than drilling the holes in the first place!

I think it was Doug who mentioned a while back, that the American cannonball safes were often fitted with separate threaded inserts into holes cast in situ at strategic points where needed, as the manganese steels and similar alloys were so tough they prevented machining, drilling and tapping. I also remember reading several times that serious lockouts on many of the safes often involved shipping them back to works with a wait of many weeks.

Am I missing something obvious as some of this and the times they're quoting seems too much like magic when you consider what they were up against!

[Doug MacQueen]

Surprisingly, using torches to anneal the hardened steel screws and rivets used in the laminated chests does go back at least into the early 1870's. In one burglary a chest was de-laminated in just a couple hours. So far as I can tell there were 3 main hard metal types being used in that era, hardened hi carb steel, chilled cast iron (as seen in the Corliss) and high manganese cast iron (Herring and possibly others). This manganese iron precedes Hadfield's manganese steel which isn't used here in the states until the Hibbard Rodman Ely at the turn of the century. Of the 3 types mentioned only the hi carb steel can be effectively annealed. At the high end of the hardness scale hi carb steel is brittle as are both cast iron types (like concrete only in tension, not in compression). Usually the outer plate of the laminated chest was softer and could be drilled and tapped. Not sure on the English chests.