 Good morning. This is Alex. This is a lock that I got from my good friend Bosnian Bill. About five inches long. Two inches tall. This part is steel and I'm going to zoom in. I hope you can see this is a thing is probably a hundred years old. It's definitely older than probably Bill and me combined. Which has a lot really. If you look at it in the light you can see some, it's kind of out of focus, but you can see that it's been, I can't remember what that's called, but when it was new it would have been very shiny. It has all these little sort of polish marks on it. I'm going to assume it's a safe deposit box. I guess before they went to sort of the standard of having a safe deposit box. I suppose it could be a mailbox, but that's a heck of a chunk of steel for mailbox. So I'm going to assume that it's some kind of safe deposit box. Now I spent a little time fiddling with it and immediately concluded that it was old and gummy and I know that Bill hadn't tried to open it or he hadn't opened it. So I took off the screws in the back, which were here and I don't know where they went, somewhere in the back. You can see that they even bothered to polish the back of the lock, which this, well you would see this part, but you'd never see this part. And it says, I think that's a G or a C, maybe that's a 6, 62, something like that. And this is a, you just see this hunk of steel, look at that. That's what, it's a half an inch of steel. I'm not going to go try to scratch it or anything, but that's massive. Here's the lock itself, you know the brass. At the very top there, it says patent number, patent August 30th, 1898. It doesn't even have a patent number. So I'm going to assume, I'll assume it's American, but we actually don't know, except that whatever, it is an English speaking country. Now the lock is presently in unlocked condition. There's some signs of corrosion. If you look in this little hole here, you can see that's the stub, a stump rather. And you can see the lever pack aligned. You'll also notice that there's some, it's like it's been beat up a little bit on here. There's a small notch here where the key would align there for key retention. So there'd be a notch in the key that would get caught behind this little lip here. I was just checking. I had to go find my magnet, but actually none of the parts that are superficially visible are, is made of steel that I can tell. So it's either brass or bronze. So similar in construction to the SMG and Yale locks that we looked at before. So at any rate, the, I could not manipulate the bolt back out. And I don't know why. And Adrian might come and order a fatois or something against me here, send the German police to punish me. But I'm going to open this up and see what's going on, because I think it's a beautiful lock. And I'd like to be able to open it, maybe even make a key for it and add it to my collection. So for the first time ever, I am loosening the screws on the front of this little guy. I have no idea how this comes apart. I'm hoping that it wants to come apart with the top coming up, because the alternative is that a bunch of stuff is going to dump out. But that feels good. Okay, now what do we have? We have the curtain. Make sure I'm still in frame. Move this up a little bit. So I have the curtain, just a piece of brass. The key sits in there. I don't have a, doesn't look like I have a key shaped thing laying around. But the key would go inside there. We have the front cover, and there's the back. Interestingly, this is the nose, which is this part that extends out. And that actually would, when assembled, comes through this steel plate like that. So it's protected by steel, so I guess you don't really need any steel inside the lock. But anyway, that's actually very interestingly, camera wanted to refocus for me. It's actually very interestingly sort of swaged in there. So it's a separate piece instead of part of the casting. It's kind of neat, but you can kind of tell it's stamped sheet metal. Anyway, so I've lowered the camera so I can get a better macro view. Now we see inside this lock a lot of dirt and detritus. And a few things that I've not seen before, interestingly. So it has your standard lever pack. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight or nine levers, probably eight. And the first thing I notice, apart from the dirt, the first thing I'm noticing here is this bit right here. If I turn this slightly, maybe not. But in one of the other locks we looked at, this thing acted like a master mechanism. Mastering mechanism and allowed you to set all or most of the levers without the proper key. So that's kind of interesting. So this might actually be a postal lock or something of that sort. Because you wouldn't think that a safe deposit box would have that sort of feature. Maybe it was off of a hotel, who knows. So I'm going to try to retract the bolt now that I can get better leverage on it. Okay, so I've managed to very gently make the bolt release. There's a lot of go in here, a lot of dirt you can see. Actually, that's an insect. So Bill sometimes jokes about bugs and spiders and stuff in his locks. But that appears to be a, I don't know, a little beetle or something maybe. I'm not sure. We have a bug expert in our midst. Maybe they can identify that. Maybe get a country of origin or some CSI kind of thing like that. At any rate, there we go. So we set the bug aside next to the screws. Piece of history there. I may even put him back in. So I'm going to very gently remove the levers and set them aside. So first thing I notice, this top lever has an oblong hole in it. It also appears to have an additional notch here. It's kind of interesting. That may have some significance in the master locking system. You can also see it's relieved in the back, which as we've talked about before can help reduce the ability to decode the lock visually. This is some dirt. More pieces of that bug on there. And a hand frame. And then we'll go to the second lever. This one has a round hole. You can see that this wire is swaged, possibly brazed in place, and it is made of knot steel. So probably brass or bronze or something like that. I am not seeing any numbers on these. That may have a two-scratch number, but I can't quite tell. This one has a one-scratched into it. I didn't do that, so maybe some locksmith did. This one's a three that I'm going to get, but it's just to remember the order to put them back in. But it could be that those are mine. This curious mechanism here, I'm going to guess as part of a bypass or master key type of mechanism. What is it meant here? I don't see what I'm on about. So I've removed all the levers, and the key would come up and push this around. This is a curious little notch here. The bolt is actually there. So the bolt is out. This is certainly not going to be able to retract it in any way. It has a little stop here. It stops on the post there and has this little notch. Now you'll notice that the first lever has a notch that lines up with that, and it has the ability to move in and out, which is curious. I have a feeling that if you are able to set this in this gap here, that if you were to line the other levers up on the post, that the lock would open. You'll even notice here that this has a little curve or a little slope on the face of it, which does not appear to be a where mark and leads me to believe that that wants to catch a lot of the bottom of the stump to slide right up in there. The stump has a little groove this way down it so that these little teeth on the things will actually grab in here. Two little clunks there. This little mastering device which is made out of at least four pieces of metal that are attached to this plate. One, two, three, four pieces of metal. Also quite dirty. And then we finally have the bolt. There's your bolt. Let's see where the key is scraped against it. So keep it interact with this and probably grab this notch here and grab the key if it were like this. My, I'm still in the frame right now. The key would come around as it turns and push this away to draw it out and then as it comes back out it's going to go down there and you can see corresponding where marks along here. The key would have been engaging. The mark is from when I was trying to pick it. So pretty cool little gizmo. Okay, I've got the, but it moves too much. I have the back case of this lock out of all the guts inside. This appears to be a casting. You can, sand casting even. You can see the roughness in here, here at my. I'm going to stop using that because it's just too rough. In here, some of these areas are machined. Probably where the important points are. It's supposed to be a piece of drill rod that was brazed in there. There's some other areas that are machined. You can see that but there's a little slot here for one of these things to operate in. There's just a little pin that is a stop for that mastering thing and all that. So I think I'm going to gently clean this. Which is to say I'm not going to use any kind of abrasives. I'm just going to put a little soap and water. Just to get the dirt out and get the black off all of these levers. This one goes here. The black off all the levers. Nope, that's another one. And put a little bit of lube in there. About three in one oil or grease or something. Put it back together and see if we can't figure out how it's supposed to work. So at any rate, I've not seen a lot made this way before. Maybe some of you have and can provide some information. I think I'll post this disassembly part on its own. And see if we can get this in here. Maybe I can get some more information. And please if this is some kind of historical relic or something. Please let me know. So I don't bugger it up too much. But anyhow, beautiful lock from 1898. I mean I've said 1896 before, 1898. So a hundred and, jeez, 115 years old. With a beautiful brass hinge on that. I don't see that stuff anymore. So somebody's box number 221. So there you go. Thank you for watching. Sorry if this ran a little long. But I find these things very interesting. I hope you do too. Please subscribe if you're not already subscribed and you enjoy my work. And as always, have fun with your lock sport activities while keeping them legal. So we can all continue to have fun. Thanks for watching. Cheers.