It's safe to say that this time the village will find a more secure place to keep the combination.

On Tuesday morning, safesmith Steve Pickett, of Pickett Lock and Safe in Oneonta, cut his way through the backside of a 100-year-old standing vault in the village office building basement that had been inadvertently locked three or four years ago.

Pickett was hired by the village to open the safe after it was discovered that no one could find the combination, said village treasurer Mary Ann Henderson.

She said the safe, which is almost five feet tall, had been open three or four years ago, but that someone had apparently closed the double doors, spun the dial and relocked it. Now, with storage space at a premium, the village wants to use it for birth and death certificates.

Pickett said he had tried to "manipulate" the lock system by listening with a stethoscope and trying to feel the lock's mechanism slip into place as he rotated the combination dial in much the same way movies depict safecrackers.

"Usually I can do them pretty good," he said, "but this one has set for so long that it's harder to manipulate. If they're used all the time, it's easier to manipulate.

The lock on the village's safe has four wheels which indicated it was a high quality safe when it was manufactured, but it makes it more difficult to try and open now.

Pickett researched the Herring & Company Patent Champion Safe in an effort to find a way in, but without luck.

Safecrackers often would try and enter a safe by drilling the lock, but some old safes were outfitted with vials of tear gas inside that would break and releasing their contents and driving off would be bank robbers.

Without knowing for certain about the presence of a gas vial, Pickett decided to go in from the back and take apart the lock from the inside.

Pickett used an angle grinder equipped with an abrasive wheel to grind through the three-sixteenths inch thick outer metallic skin of the safe and remove a ten-inch square hole through which he would be able to reach the lock.

Once through the skin there was about four inches of a plaster fireproofing material and another thin metal lining inside. After clearing out the hole, Pickett was able to reach through and access the lock mechanism and open the door.

"It was about what I thought," Pickett said after he opened the safe. "It went as planned. I've done enough so I have a sense of what to do."

Pickett is no stranger to opening safes. He has been in the lock and safe business for over 20 years and said he usually does about 200 a year in an area from Albany to Binghamton and up to Utica.

Many of the safes he opens are in an effort to settle estates.

"People die and take the combination with them," he explained. "And the will is usually in the safe with the valuables."

Another reason he is called is mechanical malfunctions when something inside the safe breaks and it can no longer be opened.

Bungled burglaries are another common cause for safe problems, he said. Would-be thieves try to gain access and damage the lock mechanism.

Today's electronic locks are fast and convenient, but there is more to go wrong with them so he also works on a number of those.

Now that the village's safe is once again open, local welder Art Calhoun will cover the hole in the back with a metal plate.

And while the doors are open, Pickett will read the combination and give it to the village for safekeeping.