I found a locked safe hidden at the back of a closet in my new house

There’s no 't" in Conway.

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Oh no, we are back to the hieroglyph thread again! Speak up man, I can’t hear ya!

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If that fails, maybe he can call Harvard

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Since they couldn’t/wouldn’t help, maybe he ought to try Harvard

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So let’s crowdfund the locksmith and in exchange you video the reveal and upload it to BB.

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Third time’s the charm?

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There’s nothing in the safe; it’s just a block of concrete with a metal skin and a door tacked to the front. There is no lock mechanism, just tumblers. The handle doesn’t actually do anything.

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Everything you need to know, right here. :wink:

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No luck so far everyone.

OP WILL DELIVER.

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Q:
What about filling it with water? Would still not be a perfect impedance match but would be way better than air.

A:
Better. The density ratio is still 6:1 so you would still get a lot reflected at each surface. The speed of sound is closer, so the refractive distortion is less. Still pretty tough. And you will have the leaking.

Q:
Drill a hole, push it (neutron source) in?

A:
Drill a bigger hole, put your arm in, take out the goodies.
If making a hole was a serious option, then all bets are off.

Q:
A grid of parallel lead plates, acting as a collimator, getting rid of the scatter from other directions?

A:
What you have just invented is called a Potter-Bucky diaphragm. You used to have motorised, vibrating versions in medical X-ray systems, so you could get the collimation without seeing the screen structure on the final X-ray. This gets the scatter down a bit. However, if you are trying to X-ray some deep part of the body such as the stomach or the spine, you will get a lot of X-rays coming through the lungs, which are largely air. Gas bubbles in the gut also show up brilliantly. So the trick is to add material in front of the patient to shadow or mask off these regions. Commercial radiography of large objects does this, but much more so. The equivalent for your safe would be to surround your safe with so much lead that the path with least mass between source and film was though the lock. That means carting around a lot of lead.

Q:
I thought more about a pulsed power xray tube. Radioactive sources are a bitch to handle.
Maybe a cold cathode pulsed xray tube fed from a Marx generator?

A:
These aren’t particularly portable either. We used to run one of those. It ran in and out on two sets of railway lines. The Marx generator was switched with pulsed UV. This was fine for us because we wanted to capture moving shockwaves in a few tens of nanoseconds. Otherwise, it is much easier to get a Co60 source and just wait a bit longer.

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Anecdotally, the guy who used to X-ray fossils for us when I worked for the Academy of Natural Sciences would wrap them in wet towels first. I don’t really have any way to confirm that, though.

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Hmph. Do method 3 of this wiki-how:


Record the sounds and turn the tumblers on an interval, like a precise beat. Perhaps repeat this process with a heat gun and additionally with something to cool the safe (perhaps humidity and dryness could alter your success).

Then copy your data and analyze it with Audacity:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/analyze_menu.html
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/plot_spectrum.html

I’ve not done any of the above, so my general thoughts are that you are looking for a notable sound difference to use for pinpointing each actual number.

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Mysterious but sadly unhelpful follow-up from Yale.

Good Afternoon Rob,

Unfortunately, Yale Locks and Hardware USA has been out of the safe business for over 50 years and unfortunately there is no information currently available from that era. There is quite simply no archive of records of combinations here at the factory. Additionally, when Yale was involved in that business, the tumbler locks were made for companies that manufactured safes and were sold in lots. All the information was sent to the safe companies. For the safety and security of the safe owners,Yale does not have a secret master combination.

Thanks

Richard Ng

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I need to sit down and really have at some of the more obvious combinations. Then I will remove the sideboard and see if the safe can be removed to make further attacks more convenient.

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Yale is the apple to your fbi lol

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Welp, you’re just gonna have to call U-Haul, and lug it to the next Toool meetup, innit?

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We already talked about all the safes on Reddit being empty…

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Give the safe to Reddit. They hate unsolved problems.

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Gives it to the internets, they’ll find the bag-men

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