Cutting out vault door on 1D?

[DavePEI]

The coin pros do this much more often than the rest of us so they are apt to come across it occasionally. I suspect it would have to do just how much the original installer torqued the screws to begin with.

I think that is more of an accurate statement. The only two locks I have ever had trouble drilling are the Medeco Millennium locks, and the multi-vane locks used in the later Northern Telecom panel phones.

On those, I ended up wedging the door down, and then using a thin cutting disk in a grinder, cutting the tongue off the lock. Those locks were incredible steel, and drilling exposed the vanes, but they were spring steel, so no amount of pulling or bending would phase them.

I did get in finally, and the door could be re-used, but the lock, of course was toast.

The upper locks were even more of a problem. Thankfully, the NE panel phones are covered with inserts of Stainless Steel. I was able to slide out the SS sheet, exposing the steel below, then by really careful cutting, used the same method to cut off the tongue of the lock, at which point I would open it using two L keys. The lock tongue in them prevents the L keys from  moving the bars which allow the phone to open. One has to be very careful to cut in the correct spot, otherwise, the locking bars themselves may be damaged. Then, once the lock was out, I replaced the SS panels, and it shows no sign of the cut through the inner steel. Where there is a will, there is a way!

Dave

[ESalter]

Coin Techs definitely have to break into phones more often than you'd think.  Most of the time they get a cut-off wheel and go into the side of the phone housing and cut the tongue off the lock, like Dave's method.  This destroys the phone, but they don't care.  Their time is worth more than trying to salvage an old 1D2 when they have plenty of other ones to just replace it with.  Drilling through the face of a Medeco or Abloy lock will cause the lock to open.  However, as I said before, drilling a hole through the face of a 30A, B, or C vault lock will NOT get it open for you.  The part of the lock that actually "locks" the tongue is in a different part of the lock mechanism.  The lower housing on the 1D phones cover too much of the lock face so you won't be able to drill a hole that's big enough/at the right angle/in the correct location. 

Lastly, out of probably a couple hundred payphones I've handled, I've found probably about a dozen that the vault or upper lock mounting bolts were just finger tight.  Quite a few were only mounted with 2 bolts instead of 4, also.

---Eric