Early 1900's Massive York Vault Door opened

Doug MacQueen · 2017-04-14T11:33:24+00:00

I thought you guys might enjoy seeing the monster early 1900’s York vault door I have spent the last couple days drilling. Finally got it open yesterday.

Chubby

What size drill did you use BTW?

00247

The burglar plate is a laminated sheet. In this picture you can see the layer joints in the 5 ply burglar plate. These pieces probably started out as 1.25” but were machined to 1” to be bolted together to create the door and door jamb on a Mosler screw door safe.

At first look I thought Mosler’s machining quality was poor but after learning of the layers of different hardness of the material, I could understand why it would have an uneven finish.

David Hovey

Doug MacQueen wrote
Yes started with short bits and used longer as needed with Mike-O-Cut No.87 heavy duty cutting oil. I had a big advantage on identification on the lock as there is an identical door entrance at the other end of the 16′ × 66′ vault room that was open. However, lacking that, only the No. 1 and 2 S&G Automatics used a 4-¼″ dial ring. The No. 2, later the C39-½, and still later the 651x series. According to the 1927 S&G catalog, top and bottom offset drives were available and York did make wide use of Yale versions of those offsets. But having never seen a big S&G vault lock with anything other than a sideshaft version, I would have gone for that. Knowing the door thickness definitely made the job go faster. The 17″ × 3-⅜″ crane hinge does give a good indication that the door was on the heavy size. Close inspection of the open door also let me know that my apparent available space in the lock was complicated by a hidden heavy horizontal supporting block that did not cover the entire lock area. Either drill through it or miss it entirely. Hitting it partially was not something I wanted to do, so between that and the pressure bar gear housing limiting hole location, the big area was reduced somewhat. But it appears that there was minimal drill deflection, so it did work out fine. I do know that without a sample the job would have taken quite a bit longer and I would have charged a whole lot more.

Now you’ve seen one. 🙂

[unknown]

Doug MacQueen

And do you have that in left hand? Next you’ll tell me it came off a Tripp York door. Thanks for the picture.

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