В Миссисипи открыт центр реставрации сейфов со списком ожидания в три года

PINE BELT, Miss. (WDAM) - Dozens of safes line the workshop walls at Tullson’s Safe and Vault Restoration. Each one carries a unique history, but all await the same one-of-a-kind service. “We have safes coming here from all over the world,” owner Chris Tull said. “We have clients in 49 different states and nine different countries.” “Each one is a historical piece,” Tull said. “It tells its own story.” From Pinstriping to Safe-Cracking For more than 15 years, Tull has blended traditional techniques with modern precision to return vintage safes and vaults to their original glory. But Tull said that, decades before his business gained international acclaim, working in his father’s auto body shop sparked his passion for restoration projects. “I learned all the body work and stuff from my dad, but I didn’t have a good hand in it,” Tull said. “He could do body work real easy, and I was always artistic.” Recognizing his son’s talent, Tull’s father steered him toward art instead. “My dad, being a body man, he didn’t like to paint, so with me being artistic, he said I could make money with my art someday,” Tull said. “He got me an airbrush when I was like nine, and I started winning art contests and car shows at about 12 years old, so I started pinstriping bikes and cars and things like that.” A chance encounter — and a challenge from his father — kindled Tull’s interest in antique safes. “When I was in my early 20s, I went to welding school and ended up running a shop, and we came across an old safe,” Tull said. “I called the shop owner and said, ‘Hey, you want me to do this old safe?’ He said, ‘I don’t care, scrap it. I don’t have the combination for it.’” Instead of scrapping it, Tull took the safe home, where his father caught him listening to it with a mechanic’s stethoscope. “He goes, ‘What are you doing?’” Tull recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, I can hear it. I can hear the lock and feel it.’ He goes, ‘You’re an idiot. This ain’t the movies. You ain’t gonna be able to get into that thing.’ About an hour later — clink — the door opened, and I cracked the safe. I’ve been doing safes ever since.” A Family Business, Restoring a Bygone Era Today, Tull and his wife, Sarah, run their own restoration business, specializing in safes and vaults from the 1800s through the 1940s. Tull serves as lead craftsman, while Sarah serves as chief operating officer. Together, they’ve learned that you don’t have to crack a safe to find something to treasure. “Safes in the 1800s were very decorative, and it was a sign of, ‘Look at what we have. It’s decorative. Your money is safe with us,’” Tull said. But much of that original beauty has been hidden for decades. Tull explained that many safes once displayed proudly in banks and businesses were painted over in the early 1900s after insurance requirements changed. “A lot of safes have been painted over — like in the ’40s, they were painting over all the artwork from the safes in the 1800s because it was too flashy,” Tull said. Now, Tull uncovers what was hidden under layers of dull gray and black paint: brilliant colors, decorative gold leaf and elaborate landscape paintings, brought back to life, one safe at a time. One Safe, Many Skills Restoring a single safe requires a complex combination of trades. “There’s body work, woodwork, metals and fabrication, painting, the artwork — that’s its own skill,” Tull said. “I lay a base coat, but also doing the gold leaf and doing the landscape murals; that’s a skill on its own, plus the safe cracking. Lots of different skills.” The process begins not with a paintbrush or lockpick, but with a camera. “When the safe arrives in the shop, the first thing that happens to it is photographs. We photograph everything,” Tull said. From there, the team traces the safe’s history and prepares it for a full teardown. “We recover all that artwork, and then we track the serial numbers and figure out where the safes came from,” Tull said. “Then we strip down all the parts and inventory everything. The parts have to be machined and then clearanced, and new parts have to be made if we’re missing anything.” Once the artwork is documented, the safe is stripped to bare metal. “We sandblast it down to bare metal, and then it starts the bodywork phase,” Tull said. “We start making all the curves straight again, getting all the lines right, because these are made out of cast manganese steel. The bottoms are made out of cast iron.” Decades-old repairs often complicate the process, but they offer Tull’s team a chance to build a stronger product. “They’re full of holes when you blast them down. Back then they didn’t have body filler; they had plaster,” Tull said. “So we blast all that plaster out, and you’re left with all the holes and the pits and the raw casting. We metalwork all that, and we fix all that.” Next comes paint — and an opportunity for customers to add a personal touch to a piece of history. “Like this one is blue,” Tull said, pointing to a cannonball safe in the middle of the workshop. “The customer wanted all the artwork to go back on how it was original, but with a custom color. It gives it a touch of modernness.” Once the base coat is finished, Tull hand-paints the artwork before the safe moves to reassembly, where freshly plated parts are put back into place. Booked Out for Years Every project has its own timeline, but Tull says an average cannonball safe takes two to three months to be fully restored. Right now, Tullson’s waitlist stretches out three years. Still, Tull says the calls keep coming. “You can go to a big box store and buy a gun safe, and it is what it is,” Tull said. “But if you want something special, something unique, those clients come here for this. This is something that’s not offered anywhere else.” For Tull, every restored safe is a chance to preserve a piece of history. “The fact that these have survived — this was made in 1910. The fact that it’s survived this long, and it’s still functional, it still works, it’s still a mode of security, and that I get to touch it, put my name on it, assign each one of my pieces, and they come with a certificate of authenticity that they came from my shop,” Tull said. “I’ll only do so many in my lifetime, so we like to say that our legacy lasts generations — because it really does.” Want more WDAM 7 news in your inbox? Click here to subscribe to our newsletter.