Can't open antique file cabinet

[blackfilecabinet]

This looks like a "Lista" brand cabinet. (relatively expensive and very good quality) Are you sure there is nothing inside the cabinet, at the back wall, behind the top-middle drawer, that when rotated moves the flat bars behind all three columns?

We all still want confirmation of how it works. Glad you got it open.

Thanks for your advice as well.

There doesn't seem to be any rotating bar or anything like that. There should be something like that, but it's missing. If you mean the 3 shiny vertical bars inside the back, yes, they each have protuberances which fit into a slot at the top of each drawer, which holds them in place when the vertical bars are down, in the locked position. The horizontal locking bar gets pushed down, which pushes these 3 vertical bars down to lock them. Since the rod is missing, you could probably lock it by pushing the locking bar down with your foot or tapping it with a mallet. I don't want to try this at the moment. But the opposite is true; I did unlock it by tapping the 3 vertical bars from below, which raised the protuberances and of course raised the horizontal locking bar.

I haven't seen any corporate logo or stamp anywhere so it's not clear who manufactured it.

[EmCee]

Glad you got it open - I should have thought about looking underneath to see if the bases of the locking bars were accessible.

So that bar on top does move up and down, and is connected to the locking bars. Now that you've pushed the bars up from the bottom, the bar at the back of the top is raised up? If so, I'd not only not risk trying to push it down to lock (unless you want to refubish the thing to working order), I'd also put some wedges under the bar to avoid the risk of it falling down again if the cabinet gets bumped or a drawer is pushed shut a tad too hard.

Cheers...