Right from the times of battles and knights, the times of the feudal lords and the horsemen, locksmiths have been playing a major role in securing valuables by making and breaking locks and safecrackers. We could arguably state that Locksmithing is the foremost and earliest of engineering and security device forms. Probably that explains why safecrackers are instruments of sophistication and security put together. Safes and safecrackers have always intrigues us, we even to a certain extent admire people who can crack safes, and the whole concept of a desirable thief has been around from as long as thieves have existed. Who can forget the bated breath that we had as we watched the Oceans’ series of films where the protagonists deftly crack the most secure of safes and get high on it! Safe cracking however is not reserved for thieves; ethical safecracking is what we will be discussing here. Safecracking is an art, an art of the deft, keen and careful worker. It takes a lot of effort on the part of the person cracking a safe to get through the process with minimum damage. A safecracker by technical terms is a person who enters vaults, safes and other contraptions that cannot be opened due to many factors.

Most safecrackers do the job only for well established business entities or people who can establish the ownership over the safe in question. There is a difference between a safecracker and a locksmith, the difference is that the safecracker is an expert and is more trained when compared to a locksmith. Most safecrackers work based on their instincts which on most occasions are true. The concept of legal or ethical safecracking is mostly used by law enforcing authorities, policemen on the beat, realtors and also people who have for a genuine lapse lost the keys to their safes. The basic concept with which safes are built in themselves lend to the possibility of safecracking, the locks are built in a way that a locksmith who knows can easily manipulate the lock to his advantage and open it without breakage. There are different types of safes like fire safe, burglary safe, etc. these can be either safes that are mounted on the wall or big safes that are on the ground. These safecrackers are also built in two ways with combination locks and without combination locks when it comes to the simpler safes typically used in residential scenarios.

The combination lock safes are of two types group 1 combination and group 2 combination where group 2 is of lower safety degree with two or three number combinations whereas group 1 - lock combinations are of higher combinations sometime going up to six numbers. The job of safecrackers is to mainly understand the inherent combination and work on the safes accordingly. Most safecrackers find the wheel pack design of safes difficult to manipulate despite the safe existing for over a hundred years now. Skilled safecrackers understand and work on this kind with care and achieve the act of cracking the safe whereas novices find the proposition difficult. If the safe is being cracked for the owner of the safe then the number combination is easy to know unless the owner has a memory gap and fails to remember the combination, in cases of non owner safe cracking tasks, the job is difficult and if the lock is a group 1 combination it becomes more profound a task. A safecracker who is professional and is both passionate and serious about his work will be well read and well researched and this will assist him in cracking the safe. The main reason a safecracker is considered or approached by the owners is because they do not want to cause any physical or functional damage to the lock as the replacement of these safes is an expensive affair also most people have safes that claim a certain amount of sentimental value. Safecrackers are an answer to a lost key or forgotten number combination and safecracking if taken up by professionals is a very interesting and intriguing profession. Safecrackers are a boon when a crisis with respect to safes arises and with tact and technological advancements these safecrackers have only gotten better over time.