Where the Wheels Line Up Isaac’s Journey Into Safe Dial Manipulation

At David Locksmith, most of our stories are about doors, keys, and the people on the other side of them. This one is a little different. It is about one of our own, Isaac Hashman, and a skill he has spent years and thousands of hours building. It is the kind of skill almost nobody offers anymore, and it is the reason we can now do something for our customers that no other locksmiths in Western Canada can do at all: open a locked safe by hand, by feel, without drilling it.

This is the first in what we hope will be a series of stories about the people and the craft behind our shop. So pour a coffee. This one is worth the read.

It started with a luggage lock and a sore thumb

Long before Isaac ever opened a safe for a paying customer, he was a kid sitting on the floor with a cheap luggage lock, turning the little wheels one number at a time, yanking on the shackle, and starting over.

If you have ever owned one of those locks, you know the feeling. Three wheels means a thousand possible combinations. Four wheels means ten thousand. Isaac did not know there was a smarter way to do it, so he just kept going. Turn, pull, turn, pull, until his thumb was raw and the answer either showed up or it did not.

What he did not realize at the time was that those little luggage locks were teaching him the first principle of everything he does today. Locks like that keep their secrets on wheels. Each number rides on its own wheel, and each wheel has a notch cut into it called a gate. Line every gate up in the right place at the same time, and a bar inside the lock called the fence can finally drop into all of them at once. That is the moment the lock lets go.

Years later, that childhood frustration would turn into a profession. But the wheels never changed. He just learned to listen to them instead of fighting them.

How Isaac met Andy

Isaac came to locksmithing sideways, the way a lot of the best people in any trade do. He got into picking locks as a hobby first, the way some people get into chess or woodworking, and he got good at it fast. Soon he ran out of locks to practice on, so he did the obvious thing and called a local locksmith to ask if there were any old ones lying around.

That locksmith was Andrew Leung, the owner of David Locksmith and the master locksmith who would eventually train him.

Andy did not hire him on the spot. He handed him a few old locks and basically said, here, let us see what you can do. Isaac took them home, picked them, and brought them back. Andy was impressed. So they kept it up for a few weeks, a quiet little exchange of locks back and forth, until one day Andy handed him a Mul-T-Lock, which is a serious high security lock, and told him that if he could pick that one, he was hired.

That is a whole story on its own, and it is one we will tell another time, because it deserves its own page. For now, what matters is this: Andy saw something real in him, gave him a chance, and fed the obsession instead of brushing it off. Isaac got his apprenticeship, did a year of hands on work, and then went to locksmithing school.

The thing about ten hour days

Here is something Isaac will tell you himself, with no embarrassment at all: he is autistic, and he believes it is a big part of why he got as good as he did.

When most people sit down to practice a skill, they last an hour, maybe two, before their attention drifts. Isaac could sit with a lock for ten hours. Not because he forced himself to, but because he genuinely could not put it down. That kind of focus is rare, and in a craft that rewards patience and repetition above almost everything else, it is a gift. He picked thousands of locks this way. And he was deliberate about it: rather than grind one lock into memory, he kept several copies of the same model on hand and switched between them, keeping every attempt honest so he was learning the skill, not just beating one lock.

By the time he had a year under Andy and was starting school, that focus had made him one of the most capable lock pickers in the country. He is comfortable saying he is among the best in Canada, and among the better ones in North America, and the online hobbyist community would not argue with that. (The full story of how he got into picking high security locks, and the videos he made along the way, is one for that future blog. He has not put any of his safe work online yet, though that may change.)

But here is the twist that makes this story interesting. When Isaac decided he wanted to learn safe dial manipulation, all of that skill only carried him so far. Picking pins and manipulating wheels share a little DNA, but in most ways they are different animals. Stepping from one to the other felt like being fluent in one language and starting a brand new one from scratch. He did not even know where to begin.

Learning to see with his hands

To understand what Isaac actually does, you have to understand the strangest part of the job, and it is the part that has nothing to do with locks at all.

When he first started picking, he says it felt like working inside a cloud. His eyes were open, looking at the lock in front of him, but the place that mattered was somewhere his eyes could not go: inside the lock, in the dark, in a space the size of a fingernail. So he had to learn to disconnect his eyes from his attention and send his focus down through the pick and into that hidden space.

The way he describes it is echolocation. A bat has eyes, but they are nearly useless in the dark, so it builds a picture of the world by bouncing sound off everything around it. Isaac does the same thing with a tool. He taps and drags it along the inside walls of the lock, off the pins, into the little chambers, and from all of that feedback his brain slowly assembles a picture. After enough practice, the cloud clears, and it stops being a feeling and starts being a kind of vision. He says it is almost like X-ray sight. He cannot see the metal, but he can feel exactly where everything is, where he is, and what is happening.

That ability is the whole foundation of his safe work. Because the first time he sat down with a combination lock and started turning wheels, the cloud came right back. He would lose track of which wheel he was on and which number he was holding. It overwhelmed him. He went back to picking for a while and told himself this was just beyond him.

But it nagged at him. If he was going to be a world class lock picker, he figured he ought to at least be able to open a basic school combination lock. So he went back, again and again, frustrated, until one day the wheels stopped being a cloud and started being something he could see in his mind. He could feel every wheel, know exactly which one he was on, and move it one number at a time with confidence, even when he could not yet feel where the gates were hiding.

Isaac’s Note: reading a combination lock by feel You do not guess and check. You put a light tension on the lock, the way you would pull gently on a luggage lock’s shackle, and then you turn the wheels and feel for the one wheel that resists differently from the others. That binding wheel is the one doing the work. Then you hunt along that wheel for the spot where the resistance loosens, because that loose point is the gate. Some locks throw in false gates to fool you, little decoy notches that feel almost right, so part of the skill is learning to tell a real gate from a liar. Do this properly and a lock with tens of thousands of possible combinations can come down to just a handful of numbers worth testing.

Climbing the ladder, one lock at a time

Isaac did not jump straight to safes. He climbed there, and each step taught him something the next one needed.

After the luggage locks came combination padlocks, the kind you grew up spinning on a school locker. Those were a real leap, because now one dial controlled all three wheels instead of one wheel each. To move the second wheel you had to make a full rotation past the first, and to reach the third you had to rotate again. Every wheel talks to the next one. That was Isaac’s first real taste of how a single dial can drive a stack of wheels, and how to isolate just one of them at a time.

He went deep here. Master, Dudley, Abus. Different brands, different quirks, different decoding methods for each, and he learned them all. Hours and hours of rolling a dial one way, then the other, one rotation, two rotations, trying to keep a map alive in his head of which wheel he was on. He learned how to read the wheels against the fence, how to find a number and then cut a thousand possibilities down to four or five worth trying.

Isaac’s Note: why a good manipulator beats brute force A school style padlock has roughly 64 thousand combinations. Tried by hand, one at a time, that is a miserable afternoon to say the least. But these locks leak information. By holding tension and feeling the wheel catch against the fence, a skilled person can read the last number directly off the lock, and from there the mechanical tolerances of the lock rule out most of the rest. Instead of 64 thousand tries, you are down to a small handful. That is the difference between guessing and decoding.

The military padlock that taught him safes

Around his second year of school, Isaac saw a video that changed his direction. Someone he looked up to in the lock picking community, not a formal mentor, just one of the people who could open things Isaac had never even held, posted a video decoding a Sargent and Greenleaf combination padlock.

This was not a school locker lock. The Sargent and Greenleaf 8077, and its older predecessor the 8088, are high security combination padlocks the United States government issued in huge numbers, on filing cabinets and secure storage, and the Canadian military used them too. The current 8077 is built to a federal specification that calls for thirty minutes of resistance to expert manipulation. What makes them special is that they are essentially a true safe style Group 2 dial built into a padlock body. Same family of mechanism, same feel, just small enough to hold in your hand.

Isaac’s Note: what makes these padlocks special A normal combination padlock has its three wheels and not much else. The Sargent and Greenleaf adds a drive cam, which forces an extra rotation to reach the wheels and complicates the combination considerably. The drive cam has a cutout at zero, which is why the combination always finishes by returning the dial to zero before you pull. Internally, pulling the shackle drives a locking pawl down into that cam. If the cam is sitting on zero, the cutout makes room for it. If the wheels are also all lined up on their true gates, nothing blocks the shackle and it opens. Miss any of it and the lock does not budge. It is a safe lock that fits in your pocket, which is exactly why it was the perfect teacher.

Isaac was hooked. The man in the video opened the lock fast, far inside its thirty minute rating, spinning the dial one way and then the other, checking and confirming things Isaac could not yet follow. He watched it, amazed, and decided he had to try. He needed a rig like the one in the video, a contraption that holds the padlock by the shackle with a spring pushing it open and a pressure gauge underneath, so that every time you set the lock back down it reads from the exact same starting point. When you are on a gate, the shackle opens a hair more, and the gauge catches that tiny dip.

As luck would have it, someone on Facebook was selling a rig he had built trying to copy the idea, and had given up after failing to open the lock. Isaac bought it.

Then came the part that says everything about how he learns. The video was quick and not very detailed, so Isaac slowed it down to a fraction of normal speed and watched it back, by his own count, something like a hundred times. He compares it to a musician slowing down a complicated phrase, playing it again and again until the fingers finally understand. There, that is where he knocks the first wheel off to confirm the number. There, that is how he tests for the second wheel. Bit by bit, it stopped being a blur and started being a method.

Life got busy. The rig sat for the better part of a year before he really dug in. But when he did, he chased it hard. He would think he found a reading, get excited, follow it down a rabbit hole, and then start doubting himself. Am I imagining this? Is this real? He had never actually opened one, so he had no way to know if he was doing it right.

And then one night, testing numbers he had half talked himself out of, he set the combination, moved the last wheel over, tested, moved it again, tested, moved it again, and the shackle popped open in his hand.

He sat there in shock. He had been working toward exactly that, and it still caught him completely off guard. Then came the part every locksmith in this story will recognize: he had to call everyone, tell everyone, take pictures, post it. He had done it.

The one nobody else had cracked

After that first one, Isaac collected more of the padlocks, a few from a batch on eBay with no combinations set, a couple more locally, and he decoded them one after another. (One small piece of luck: four locks in a single batch happened to share the same combination.)

Then he found a shrouded version, one with a cover over the body. From what he could find online, every recorded success had been on the standard, unshrouded locks. Even the man in the original video had mentioned trying the shrouded one and giving up, because the cover threw off his measurements and made the readings too inconsistent to trust.

Isaac wanted to take up the challenge for himself anyway. He would get a reading he believed in, chase it for weeks, hit a dead end, walk away, and come back. At one point he threw out a number he had been completely confident in, started over from scratch, found a different spot on the wheel, and followed that instead. And after weeks of giving up and coming back, the shackle opened.

No one has publicly recorded decoding that shrouded version. He is the only one he is aware of who has done it. In the lock community there is a simple, honored rule: if you are the first to do something on film, you get to claim it. So he is excited to claim this one once he does this on film.

Finally, a real safe dial

By his third year of school, Isaac was ready for the real thing. The school had cutaway dials and display mounts, and he started learning the actual techniques of safe dial manipulation: reading contact points, feeling for the narrow spots that tell you something is lining up.

At first he was genuinely confused about one basic thing. On the padlock, he could pull the shackle to test whether he was on a gate. A safe dial gives you nothing to pull. So how do you even know when you have it? The answer turned out to be almost funny in its simplicity. You just turn the dial. When the combination is right, the dial itself turns the bolt and opens the safe.

Isaac’s Note: how a safe dial actually opens Behind the dial sit the wheels, plus a spring loaded arm called the drop lever that rides against the drive cam. The cam has an opening in it, and as you spin the dial you can feel where that opening narrows. Those narrow spots are your contact points, and tracking how they shift is how you read the lock. When every wheel is sitting on its true gate, the drop lever can fall all the way into place, and now turning the dial retracts the bolt. That is the moment the safe opens. No pulling, no force. The lock just lets you turn it.

Everything he had drilled on the padlocks paid off here. The grunt work of manipulating wheels, knowing which wheel you are on, how many rotations you have made, how to hold and turn the dial cleanly, all of it transferred. People underestimate that part. Just controlling a wheel well, before you decode anything at all, is its own advanced skill, and Isaac had spent a thousand hours earning it.

The safe dials brought new problems, though. The changes he was feeling for could be as small as a quarter of a number, sometimes an eighth. He remembers being intimidated, wondering how on earth he would ever read something that subtle out in the real world instead of in a quiet classroom.

Then a colleague and friend in the trade lent the shop a safe dial, and Isaac more or less lived on it. He started charting it properly, putting real numbers on paper… And this one was not a basic dial, as it had false gates, and the wheels themselves were very slightly oval. You could not see the oval shape with your eye, but on the chart it showed up as one wheel reading high in one spot and low in another, narrow points that had nothing to do with a gate at all.

That lock taught him how to handle the moment every manipulator dreads: you chart all the wheels and get no clear answer. What then? He learned to chart all wheels in one direction, find the single most narrow point anywhere on the chart, and then start moving individual wheels to figure out which one was actually causing it. Once he could isolate a single wheel and find one real gate, everything downstream got dramatically easier. He got so good on that particular lock that he had his boss reset it without telling him the combination, over and over, just to see how fast he could crack it cold. His record was somewhere around ten or fifteen minutes. By his own joke, he must have spun that one dial twenty kilometers’ worth of distance.

And after all of it, the thousands of hours across luggage locks and padlocks and safe dials, he still describes himself, at that point, as a beginner. That is not false modesty. It is just an honest read of how deep this craft goes.

Two safes, two customers

The skill became a service the day it walked out of the classroom.

The first was a downtown office. A customer had taken over a property, and a locked safe came with it. No combination, and she did not want it drilled, because drilling voids the fire rating and changes the safe forever. She just wanted to know if it could be opened cleanly. Isaac worked it while a colleague handled some other locks for her. On that first visit he got close, confirmed a couple of numbers, but ran out of time and had to leave for the next job without opening it. He came back a few days later, re-confirmed his numbers, found the last one, and felt that unmistakable moment when the contact points vanish and the drop lever falls in and the whole lock starts to turn. He opened it in about twenty minutes on that second trip.

Then came the part he is too honest not to admit. Heart pounding, grinning ear to ear, he had to walk into the next room, put on a calm face, and casually tell the customer he had it open. They were both hoping for gold and jewelry inside. It was empty. But that safe, a Chubb/Gardex SP2FB, is the very one David Locksmith later cleaned up and put up for sale, and you can see the ad for it here:

https://www.davidlocksmith.ca/safes-for-sale

After the first job, Andy mentioned to a few other locksmiths that Isaac was opening safes. One of them had a customer with a locked safe and passed the job to us. It was a Brawn MB-3321, a double door drop safe with a Sargent and Greenleaf dial on each door, owned by two partners who run a restaurant. They were considering buying a brand new one, a couple thousand dollars or more, because they could not get into the one they had. They did not want it drilled either.

Isaac did a site visit, charted the bottom door for about an hour, and hit exactly the wall he had learned about on that dial with the oval wheels. Charting all wheels in one direction gave him no clear indication. He arranged with the customers for the safe to come to our shop. It was delivered at the end of the week and that same weekend on Sunday night, he found time to work on it. Starting at around ten o’clock, with nothing but his chart, a pen, and his hands, he went out to the garage and started feeling it out. By one in the morning, both doors were open. This time, every time he hit a wall, he knew how to go around it. Different direction, different trick, keep hunting for a reading. He called the customer the next day, trying to be as cool as could be on the phone while, in his words, screaming on the inside like his favorite sports team won the world championship.

Why a machine cannot do what a hand can

Most safe companies do open safes, including the established ones here in the city. But none of them manipulate a dial by hand, because they do not have someone on staff who can. What they have instead is an autodialer, a machine that bolts onto the dial and tries combinations mechanically.

Autodialers have their place, and we will be fair about it. The obvious upside is that a tech can set one running and go do other work while it grinds away. But that upside comes with a real catch. Running in the background usually means the dialer is left at your location, and that means you, the customer, are often asked to carry a liability fee in case anything happens to it, sometimes more than a thousand dollars. That is an uncomfortable weight to take on. And plenty of locksmiths will not leave their dialer at all, which means the only way it works is hauling a heavy safe to their shop, with all the cost and hassle of moving it.

Set against that, here is what doing it by hand actually offers:

•           Speed. A machine can take anywhere from four to eight hours on a job a skilled hand sometimes opens in under an hour.

•           Four wheel locks. For a four wheel combination, an autodialer is essentially unfeasible. It could run for a month or more. By hand is the only realistic option.

•           A real answer, fast. If a job is genuinely beyond reach, a person knows within a day, not after weeks of a machine tying up your safe.

•           No machine on the wheels. Autodialers are hard on the dial and can wear it, and if one is set up wrong it can even bend a spindle.

•           Diagnosis. This is the big one. A machine cannot feel a stuck fly, a loose spindle, or wheel drift. Those are exactly the faults that will defeat a dialer entirely, leaving it to grind forever and never find the combination. A skilled person feels them, understands what is happening, works around it, and gets the safe open anyway.

A machine can only do the one thing it was built to do. A person can think.

Where this is headed

Isaac is a journeyman now, schooling finished, and David Locksmith has access to a membership with SAVTA (the Safe and Vault Technicians Association). That membership opens the door to training and courses that are not available to the general public, or even to most locksmiths without it. He has every intention of using all of it.

He will tell you plainly that this is the beginning, not the destination. He wants hundreds of safes opened in the field under his belt. He wants to take on the Group 2 dials that are built specifically to resist manipulation (Group 2M), and eventually the Group 1 dials too. Very few people in the world can do that and he intends to be one of them.

What drives it is simple, and it is the same thing that put a kid on the floor with a luggage lock all those years ago. He loves locks. He loves the feel of them, the puzzle of them, the quiet of disappearing inside a mechanism nobody else can see. That passion is the real product here. The service is just what happens when you let someone chase a thing that hard for that long.

WANTED: If you have a locked safe in Calgary

Here is the practical part. David Locksmith now offers safe dial manipulation by hand as a real, advertised service and we are the only shop in Western Canada doing so.

If you have a safe you cannot get into and you do not want it drilled, we should talk. Maybe it was your grandfather’s and you do not want it harmed. Maybe it is an antique, or it has a special finish or paint you want to protect. Maybe there are sensitive contents inside, even something like old asbestos materials, that you do not want disturbed and sent airborne in your home. Maybe you simply like the peace of mind of knowing your safe was never breached and is still exactly as it was made. Whatever the reason, opening it by feel keeps it whole, and it keeps its fire and security ratings intact.

And if we are being honest, it is also just a remarkable thing to watch. Very few people on earth can sit down at a strange dial and talk their way inside it with nothing but their hands. If you have ever wanted to see a genuine, old fashioned skill performed up close, this is one of them.

Give us a call or a text at 403 280 2993, and ask about safe opening. We will tell you straight whether it is something we can do, and we will do it without leaving a mark.

There is a second thing this skill makes possible: safes for sale

Opening safes by hand does not just get people back into their own safes. It also means quality safes come through our shop, and many of them are worth keeping and bringing them back to life. When we open a safe cleanly, by manipulation instead of drilling, it keeps its fire rating and its security rating fully intact. So instead of being scrapped, a serious commercial safe gets a second life.

That is how David Locksmith ends up with high quality used safes for sale in Calgary, the kind that cost thousands of dollars new, offered for a fraction of the price. The Chubb and Gardex safe from that downtown office is a good example. New, that class of fire and burglary safe runs well into the thousands. The only real difference with ours is a few cosmetic bumps and scratches that have no effect on how the safe works. The steel, the fire rating, the lock, and the boltwork are all exactly what you would get paying full price.

And there is a real difference between buying a used safe from us and buying one off Facebook Marketplace from someone who cannot tell you a thing about it. We are licensed locksmiths. Before a safe goes up for sale, we check the boltwork, confirm the dial spins and reads correctly, and make sure the whole lock is operating the way it should. We can also recombinate the safe so it opens on your own private code, not a stranger's. You are not gambling on an unknown box. You are buying a tested, working safe backed by a locksmith.

If you are in Calgary and looking for a high quality safe without paying full retail, it is worth seeing what we have.

Call or text 403·280·2993
or email locksmith@shaw.ca