We are a group of young couples from Valley Church in West Des Moines, Iowa who have felt God's call to help The Pines Christian Care Center for Children in Welkom, South Africa as they care for children who have been orphaned by the AIDS Pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Kevin Barber
"Breaking" News: We cracked the safe!
Note: This is just an update from the earlier post today... We did lots of more important stuff today than cracking into a safe, so read that post first... this was just a fun little side project.
OK, so here's the back-story on this. Since this building was formerly the offices for a gold mining operation, and since they had pretty much left everything as was and vacated the building, they have lots of safes here, most of
which Brian had a key for.
One particular safe, however, was very large and was in the "Cash Office" - no keys or combination was left that we could find, so we did the next best thing - punched a hole in the wall and took the safe apart from the inside. When I say it like that, it sounds very easy...
First, the safe has concrete walls about 1 1/2 to 2 feet thick with rebar on both sides. We went through a variety of tools to get even one hole all the way through. Today Brian rented a rotary hammer and made much shorter work of punching the hole in the wall.
Next, once we were able to squeeze inside (and when I say 'we' I mean Kris, Scott, and Cory) we went to work on pulling open the safe door after discovering the key for the inner gate. This safe had 2 combination locks and a key lock, so we had to pull apart the backs of the locks to watch the cams line up to get the correct combination. We also pulled apart the key-lock since we could not find the correct key.
So, what was in the safe? Like I said in the earlier post, there were 2 additional safes and a lot of books and papers from the mining operation - nothing of any value or interest to us. There were two "mystery boxes" which we found out
were cash boxes - empty, of course.
After much searching, we did finally find the keys for the safes inside - not a whole lot of interest except for a very interesting briefcase - with an alarm and smoke bomb!
So, although we had lots of fun in the process, it ended up being rather anti-climatic getting into the safe. It still brought back memories of "exploring" as a kid.
-Kevin
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Kevin Barber
"Breaking" News: We cracked the safe!Note: This is just an update from the earlier post today... We did lots of more important stuff today than cracking into a safe, so read that post first... this was just a fun little side project.
OK, so here's the back-story on this. Since this building was formerly the offices for a gold mining operation, and since they had pretty much left everything as was and vacated the building, they have lots of safes here, most of
which Brian had a key for.One particular safe, however, was very large and was in the "Cash Office" - no keys or combination was left that we could find, so we did the next best thing - punched a hole in the wall and took the safe apart from the inside. When I say it like that, it sounds very easy...
First, the safe has concrete walls about 1 1/2 to 2 feet thick with rebar on both sides. We went through a variety of tools to get even one hole all the way through. Today Brian rented a rotary hammer and made much shorter work of punching the hole in the wall.
Next, once we were able to squeeze inside (and when I say 'we' I mean Kris, Scott, and Cory) we went to work on pulling open the safe door after discovering the key for the inner gate. This safe had 2 combination locks and a key lock, so we had to pull apart the backs of the locks to watch the cams line up to get the correct combination. We also pulled apart the key-lock since we could not find the correct key.So, what was in the safe? Like I said in the earlier post, there were 2 additional safes and a lot of books and papers from the mining operation - nothing of any value or interest to us. There were two "mystery boxes" which we found out
were cash boxes - empty, of course.After much searching, we did finally find the keys for the safes inside - not a whole lot of interest except for a very interesting briefcase - with an alarm and smoke bomb!
So, although we had lots of fun in the process, it ended up being rather anti-climatic getting into the safe. It still brought back memories of "exploring" as a kid.
-Kevin
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