Safelocks & Fittings

Time locks

Time locks were invented back in the late 1800's. James Sargent of Sargent & Greenleaf,  was instumental in being the first to install a time lock onto a bank vault door using parts from locks and two, eight-day kitchen clocks. He personally connected the time lock to the vault door of the First National Bank in Morrison, Illinois, on May 26, 1874 and this lock remained in place for nearly forty years until the bank had a larger vault built.

Time locks are usually installed on the inside of a safe or vault door making it impossible to tamper with the lock once the door has been closed without physically cutting into the safe which would obviously take time and make a great deal of noise. The idea of a time lock is to set the safe to open at a particular time - usually at the start of the next working day. For instance, if your business opened at 8am and closed at 5pm, at closing time, you would set the clock for 8am the next day. Once closed, no-one can open the safe before the set time. This is a deterent to would be thieves who may plan to take an owner or employee hostage in the middle of the night and try to force them to open the safe under duress. Usually, businesses post signs around the premises to inform would be thieves that the safes are time locked in the hope that this will deter them from attempting this method in the first place.

There are usually 2 'movements' in a standard time lock, although it is possible to have a 3 or even 4 movement time lock. The reason is simple. If one of the time movements fail, one of the others will continue to run and allow the door to open at the stated time. 

Operating a time lock With the safe door open, a key is pushed onto one of the time lock movements arbors and the key turned to the amount of hours which you want the safe to remain locked. This is done on all movements in the time lock. Push the locking trigger in the centre. The safe is then closed and the bolts thrown by turning the safe lock handle. The safe is now secured until the time locks run down allowing the safe door to open.

Some of the more well known manufacturers of safe time locks are:

• Sargent & Greenleaf - often refered to as S&G (USA)
• STB (Switzerland)
• Relhdis SA (Switzerland)
• Chubb (UK)