Star Push-Down Safe Bench

next—

The safe floor safe · looking down

Advance after each read by

Dial 0 Direction — Turns since reversal 0.00

Datum

.0000

At contact

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Rise from datum — graph this

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Drag the outer rim to turn. Press and hold the middle of the dial — or hold the space bar — to push it down, then let go and watch the indicator.

Wheel pack from the front

Brass means a pin is in contact and that wheel is being driven. A green notch is a gate sitting under the fence.

Graph #1 · all wheels left0 plotted

Click a plotted point to pull its numbers up.

Graph pad

Park all at Hold W1 Hold W3

Across the top is how far the dial rose before the cam stopped it. The fence rests on whatever is underneath it, so when a gate happens to be there the fence settles a little deeper and the dial comes back up a little less. Small number, left side of the sheet: something gave under the fence. Big number, right side: it landed on solid wheel edge. You are hunting the leftmost excursions, and they are worth about three thousandths.

Mechanism

what is happening under the door while you work

Edge section cut through the safe as it sits in the floor

Field readings

for a real safe on a real bench, with a real indicator

Log a reading

Dial number Reading

Units Deeper reads Step the dial number on

Units only change the label on the axis and the numbers in the table — nothing in this depends on absolute size, only on how the readings differ from each other. Switch units at any time and everything already logged is converted. Set deeper reads to match how your indicator is zeroed: on the bench upstairs a gate makes the dial rise less, so lower is deeper, but zero the indicator the other way round and it reverses.

Dial	Reading	vs deepest

Field sheet0 logged

Click a plotted point to pull its numbers up.

Deepest so far

Nothing logged yet.

Tests & decoder

bench work with a pencil, not the dial

Test combinations figures 8.6 and 8.7

Suspected gate Control

Test	W1	W2	W3	Rise	Dial sequence

your call

Two readings level means the control was a poor pick, or it is sitting on a gate itself. Run it again with a control ten the other way — that is why the chapter prints two tables side by side.

Spell it out

First · W3 Second · W2 Third · W1

Demo dialler a shortcut, not a step of the job

First · W3 Second · W2 Third · W1

This spins the dial upstairs for you and leaves it parked on zero. Everything after that — the push, the drop, the run right to seventy-three, the handle — you still do by hand on the safe itself.

Left-right-left into right-left-right

First · W3 Second · W2 Third · W1 Pin width

Direction

Each wheel is contacted on the other face of its pin when you dial the other way, so its number moves by the pin width once for wheel 1, twice for wheel 2, three times for wheel 3. Measure the pin width on the lock in front of you and put it in; two graduations is a common starting figure. On this bench pin width is modelled as zero, so both sequences dial the same here — the conversion is for the lock on your bench top.

Sequence decoder

Built from the Star push-down chapter of The National Locksmith Guide to Manipulation (Ch. 8, © 1987 The National Publishing Co.) as a teaching aid for locksmiths. Star is not AMSEC: if an AMSEC floor safe is the real job, the lock is most likely an S&G 6730 or similar Group 2 and none of this applies to it. Free play is modelled as one full revolution per pin pair, which makes the 4–3–2 turn count come out exact; a real lock loses a couple of graduations to pin width.