Unidentified Remote Combination Viewer Vaults

[T Davison]

Copy of page #9 from S&G catalog #21 1927.

Here page # 63 from a Remington Sherman Catalog no date

[VaultDoors]

Here is the updated Remote Combination Viewer Vault Inventory. Please let me know if any you have any additions/corrections, thx.

Remote Combination Viewer Vault Inventory.pdf

[VaultDoors]

One King West has made their Safety Deposit Vault an interactive experience. They replaced the steel panel on the Remove Combination Viewer with plexiglass and added a placard near the RCV titled 'Take a Closer Look'. Unfortunately, the lettering is too small to read but I assume it describes the inner workings of the RCV and may even allow tourists to flip on the viewer light and spin the combo dials.

[VaultDoors]

The main door appears to have a single combo and the emergency door has a dual combo, is that right?

[wylk]

I'll just cut and paste from another thread:

The pressure system, or pressure bars, is a mechanical system that presses the door very firmly into the door frame. This ensures the door can be locked tightly without any gaps that could allow explosives (such as nitroglycerine) to be poured in. It also helps seal the door against fire, smoke, and flooding. It can also mitigate problems from normal wear on the hinges that cause the door to sag, by pulling the door up against its taper and thus lift it upward. And when it comes time to open a tightly pressed-in door, the pressure bars can exert force to help break it free of the door frame.

Pressure systems can generate very great forces, many tons in most cases.

The system usually consists of one, two, three, or four bars across the door that rotate less than one turn. The bars are rotated by a large hand wheel and gears. Each bar has an offset pin that engages an anchor with a curved slot. In some cases the bar has a rotating slot and the pin is in the anchor.

The pressure needs to be evenly applied across the door.

------------------

Your other question, how does that door lock and unlock, is another small story. For a time there were worries that burglars could punch lock spindles through the door and use the hole(s) to somehow unlock the door (which would include messing with the time lock). One approach to avoid this problem is the side-mount control as seen in this thread (with or without the viewer optics which simply gives greater security against visual eavesdropping) which places the locks well away from the time locks. The other approach, as in the door you show, is to use the time lock to cause the door to open itself using a bolt motor (big springs) which requires zero holes in the door or vault. In this case, at closing time, two big springs are compressed and latched, and the time lock is set for the next scheduled opening. When the door is closed one of the springs is tripped and the door locks itself. At opening time the other spring is tripped and the door unlocks itself. The springs and timers are usually doubled (or more) for redundancy in case a spring breaks but that's the basic idea. The bad part about an automatic door is that it will unlock itself even if nobody is there, such as a blizzard that makes travel nearly impossible for the bank manager but not criminals who seize the opportunity. Or riots. One refinement was a time lock that could have time added to it remotely using a telephone circuit. I've always felt that both approaches (side-mount controls, automatic boltwork) were solutions in search of a problem and serve as examples of marketing skills.

[David Hovey]

I'll just cut and paste from another thread:

The pressure system, or pressure bars, is a mechanical system that presses the door very firmly into the door frame. This ensures the door can be locked tightly without any gaps that could allow explosives (such as nitroglycerine) to be poured in. It also helps seal the door against fire, smoke, and flooding. It can also mitigate problems from normal wear on the hinges that cause the door to sag, by pulling the door up against its taper and thus lift it upward. And when it comes time to open a tightly pressed-in door, the pressure bars can exert force to help break it free of the door frame.

Pressure systems can generate very great forces, many tons in most cases.

The system usually consists of one, two, three, or four bars across the door that rotate less than one turn. The bars are rotated by a large hand wheel and gears. Each bar has an offset pin that engages an anchor with a curved slot. In some cases the bar has a rotating slot and the pin is in the anchor.

The pressure needs to be evenly applied across the door.

------------------

Your other question, how does that door lock and unlock, is another small story. For a time there were worries that burglars could punch lock spindles through the door and use the hole(s) to somehow unlock the door (which would include messing with the time lock). One approach to avoid this problem is the side-mount control as seen in this thread (with or without the viewer optics which simply gives greater security against visual eavesdropping) which places the locks well away from the time locks. The other approach, as in the door you show, is to use the time lock to cause the door to open itself using a bolt motor (big springs) which requires zero holes in the door or vault. In this case, at closing time, two big springs are compressed and latched, and the time lock is set for the next scheduled opening. When the door is closed one of the springs is tripped and the door locks itself. At opening time the other spring is tripped and the door unlocks itself. The springs and timers are usually doubled (or more) for redundancy in case a spring breaks but that's the basic idea. The bad part about an automatic door is that it will unlock itself even if nobody is there, such as a blizzard that makes travel nearly impossible for the bank manager but not criminals who seize the opportunity. Or riots. One refinement was a time lock that could have time added to it remotely using a telephone circuit. I've always felt that both approaches (side-mount controls, automatic boltwork) were solutions in search of a problem and serve as examples of marketing skills.

I think Tim was being facetious when he ask his questions about the automatic vault door.

DH

[VaultDoors]

If you blow up the attached pic can see the 1:00 and 1:30 locking bolts on the Philadelphia Federal Reserve vault door are hollow at the top for the electric contacts to be installed. You can also see the time lock door keys



Also, what is the bright horizontal metal band on the jamb below the remote combo viewer? This looks to be the same height as the platform would be. The Capital Grille vault (York) appears to have a similar metal band:



And the Cleveland Federal Reserve (York) doesn't have a band but what looks like a beveled panel attached to the jamb at the platform height.

[VaultDoors]

I believe the data plate on the lower hinge may be an access panel for servicing the hinge. Similar plates can been seen on the Cleveland Federal Reserve's Emergency Vault Door:



and One King West's Main Vault Door:

[T Davison]

The main door has two locks if you look at the viewer you will see in the lower area of the case a second helix gear. That was the second dial hook up. It was removed for repair.

The pins are a anti- drill system that most vaults use for protection. The idea is hard to soft to hard . This type of construction or lamination of hard to soft metal will break drill bits off in the hole. ( A drill bit edge will wear or dull with the factors of cutting speed to cutting pressure to the materiel hardness. When you change the materiel hardness you change the fiction or drag on the edge of the drill bit. This change will break a drill bit off in seconds.)

Those little plate are doors to adj the hing system on the crane arm. The wrenches are made custom to fit each door. Hope this explains some of the questions. TJ

[wylk]

As for your question about round and rectangular doors, I believe round ones showed up roughly 1900 (maybe a little earlier) when manufacturing could easily handle such large pieces at the required precision. But why? What's the advantage? My impression is that it's partly marketing. A big round door is quite impressive. And you can make a case that machining a round door to an airtight fit with its frame is easier.

My impression is that they first showed up mostly in private safe deposit companies.

It was common for larger banks to have two separate vaults. One would use a round door for the safe deposit boxes (once banks got into that business) because they look cool, and a smaller rectangular-door vault for their own cash, securities, and ledger books. At times these were side-by-side and might even share a wall to reduce construction costs. In other cases one vault was built on top of the other (such as One King West in Toronto).

Round doors started fading in popularity around 1960 or so, at least that's my impression.

Getting back to the thread topic, Holmes adapted his side-mount controls to both styles.