Impressioning S&G Safe Deposit Lock

[Robotnik]

Impressioned my first lever lock the other day. In the interest of accuracy, I should say "locks," because the are two, and "days," because it took a couple.

It's a Sargent & Greenleaf safe deposit box lock, obtained without guard key and with a mismatched (and thus inoperable) operating key. Grabbed some brass stock and went to work with a grinder, Dremel, files and lighter. After a few false starts and a fair bit of cursing, had two keys and a working lock.

Operating lock is six lever, guard lock is five. Not the prettiest cuts on the keys, but they do work . I'll post photos of the keys once I'm through cleaning them up a bit, as well as the back side of the lock. Eventually want to swap out the top case of this lock with some acrylic, since I find lever locks' mechanism of operation fascinating.

[Wizer]

Nice work on impressioning those. I`ve been working on similiar locks inside a Joli safe. It has two different keyed locked drawers to which i only have one of keys. 3 levers.
I impressioned a key for the orphan lock with some thin peaces of metal I had, but transferring the cuts to a real blank has been more difficult than I expected.
4 tries with files and slotter machine have not worked even tho I copied the working "key" to the accuracy of 1/10 mm.
Now I´m waiting for more blanks.
5-6 lever would be much harder.

[GWiens2001]

Accuracy of .1 mm. That's pretty good! Makes me think the difference could be the thickness of the key blank rather than the accuracy of your depth cutting.

Have you tried to cut the key slightly shallow, then finish it with impressioning? It is easier to cut shallower and impression deeper than the other way around.

Gordon