Safe Opening in Palo Alto

Combinations go missing in a handful of ways, and Palo Alto manages every one. A Crescent Park home office whose safe code left with a former assistant. An Old Palo Alto house that passes to the children with a floor safe under the closet carpet and no note anywhere. A lab in Stanford Research Park with a records safe nobody on the current staff has ever opened. A University Avenue restaurant whose drop safe was known to one manager, now gone. A gun safe in Barron Park with a keypad that stopped answering on a Sunday. More than any lock in the house, a safe deserves a locksmith rather than a drill. Tall Tree Lock & Safe opens them by feel, by instrument, and only when both have failed and you have agreed, by a drill placed from the maker's drawing and plugged afterward.

The quiet methods come first, and each one is given its time. A keypad that has gone dark almost always has a corroded battery contact or a broken ribbon between the pad and the lock, which is a repair rather than an opening. A dial is manipulated by feel on the wheel pack, and that can take an hour or more, which is time well spent against a hole. When feel fails, an instrument decodes the wheels. Drilling is what remains when those have failed and you have agreed to it; the bit goes exactly where the maker's drawing puts it for that model, beside the relocker and clear of the glass plate that would fire it. The hole is then closed with a hardened plug, the lock is reset or replaced, and the safe returns to work. Ownership is settled before any of it starts.

Safe opening sits between $195 and $539 with the $89 visit inside. A failed keypad or a simple electronic lockout is the $195 end. Manipulating a mid-size dial is the middle. Drilling and properly repairing a high-security lock or a heavy gun safe is the $539 end. Safes vary more than doors, so the call gives a range and the exact figure is fixed with the safe in view. From that point it does not move, and a drill, if it comes to one, is not a reason for it to.

You call and describe the safe: make, rough size, dial or keypad, bolted down or free-standing. The figure is said on the call as a range, then fixed at the safe. The van leaves Midtown, and a text names the technician and the window. Ownership, diagnosis and the opening follow, without drilling wherever the lock allows, then a new combination you set yourself, fresh batteries where they apply, and several closings with the door shut before the receipt repeats the figure.