When James Unsworth was three years old, he accidentally locked himself in the bathroom. His mother called a construction worker from across the street to help and it was only when the boy saw the stranger at the bathroom window did he pass the key under the door, as she’d been asking him to do.

“I guess I didn’t want to be in that situation ever again,” says Unsworth, now 37, who started working as an apprentice locksmith at 18.

After five years of opening locks to cars and homes, he noticed that no one in the Surrey, B.C., area was cracking safes. With no apprenticeship for this elite skill, Unsworth taught himself by doing it on the job and reading.

Now, through his own business, Solid Rock Safe and Lock, he mainly takes calls from businesses whose safes have been vandalized, people whose mechanism is stuck or  owners who have simply forgotten the combination. First thing, he asks for the make and model and sometimes a digital picture by cellphone.

Then he digs into his reference materials to find out all he can about the safe’s lock and construction.

If it’s a dial — only about half are these days, almost all new safes are digital —  Unsworth cracks using a technique called manipulation. Just like the guys in the movies, he turns the dial and listens for clicks. However, the clicks reveal the numbers of the combination, but not the order, and Unsworth needs to use mathematical calculations to figure that out.

If the lock’s been ripped off by a botched burglary or it’s digital, Unsworth has to get out his special drill. He puts small holes through the lock in strategic places and then inserts a borescope, a flexible tube with a lens on one end and an eyepiece on the other, so he can look at the inner workings of the lock. He then uses special tools to make the mechanism line up.

This process usually wrecks the lock — but not the safe — so he installs a new one when he’s done. It takes Unsworth anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours to crack a lock (he hasn’t met one he couldn’t crack, yet), so no, it’s not nearly as fast or as quiet as they portray in the movies.

“If you lock your keys in your car, you don’t want to wait 12 hours. But if you’ve got some business records in your safe, you can usually wait until the next day.”

Unsworth would never use his skills to steal, since he makes enough money doing his job legitimately. He also enjoys the challenge and flexibility of his job, which allows him to work part time as a firefighter.