Tom Gordon had some questions about locking bolts on cannonball safes and I wanted to give a little background.
I bought my first cannonball in Reno in 1976. It was made by “Herring-Hall-Marvin” and is the largest I have seen so far. Since then I have been able to buy 5 more. I only have 1 that has a single combination lock, all the rest have 2 combination locks, and all have time clocks.
About the “bolts”: When both combination locks are unlocked and at least one of the time clocks runs all the way down to zero then the bolts (almost always 2 bolts located at 3 and 9 o’clock) can be withdrawn. In the center of the door is a small square drive sticking out of the door. A handle which is about 3 inches long, has a square of metal at one end that fits over the square drive; and has a protrusion so that your thumb and forefinger can hold the handle and turn it thereby spinning the drive.
Note that in the Locked position (either combination lock or the time clock remains locked) the square drive shaft is NOT engaged to the gears that turn the locking bolts. Yes, I meant to say Turn the locking bolts. These bolts do not shoot out like a normal safe. Even the large bank vault doors that have many locking bolts simply move straight out or straight in. A cannonball (like nearly every other aspect) works differently. When the cannonball is unlocked the square drive shaft is engaged and as you spin the shaft with the small handle the bolts are rotated and since they are rotating on a screw type drive they either retract back into the door or rotate out into the corresponding socket in the door frame.
The reason for this screw type gearing is that if (and that’s a pretty big if) a burglar could manage to drill a hole into the side of the safe and into the door frame and try to “punch” the bolt back it would not work because the bolt is not simply pushed straight out it is screwed into place by its own mechanism.
Likewise the reason that the square drive-shaft is not engaged to the bolts in the locked position is that a burglar can not put any pressure on the bolts via the square shaft since in the locked position the shaft merely spins freely. (By the way this is not the system that an Ely-Norris uses) There’s lots more, but maybe this helps.
