Corvette ZR1 owner calls 911 after locking himself in car4/13/11 5:30pm Lee Adams of central Florida owns 14 high-end sports cars, including a Ferrari, Mosler, Ariel Atom and a Corvette ZR1. Or he used to own a ZR1, until he had to call 911 after getting locked inside. Adams told the FerrariChat forums of his woes at the hands of General Motors' tricky machine interface engineering:I closed the door and the door locked and would not open. The car would not start. I called 911 and the police came quickly thankfully. Once the officer assured himself that ilt was a car problem and not a idiot driver problem. He nor I could not figure out what to do.He called the chevy dealership. They recommended I get out of the seat and crawl to the back of the ZR1 and pull the emergency tag. It is not a pretty sight to see a fat, 65 yr old man crawling to the back of the car. Well I did and the trunk opened.That was this morning and the ZR1 is sold, gone out of my life. Took it to the dealer that helped me and sold it cold and flat.

It is still in my garage I am not going near it. They will have to come to my home and get it out of my garage.Thank god for the police and the chevy dealer. What a stupid system to put onto a car. Just think , if my garage door was closed not open and I did not have a cell phone and my wife just left for Vermont It could have been alot worse.No more cars for me with automatic door lock systems. FYI the officer said his captain had the same problem with his Corvette.Now, let's unpack this a bit: Adams, a retired executive, owns enough vehicles that he can't drive them all regularly, and has to keep some of them on battery chargers so they don't run down — which is what happened to the ZR1. Unfortunately for him, not only was he unaware of the manual release switch for the doors located on the floor near the seats and detailed in the Corvette's owner's manual, the Chevy dealer on the phone was also unaware — despite it being a somewhat common problem for Corvette owners.According to his posts, Adams will fill his empty spot with another GM sports car — namely a high-end Camaro.

And it's not as if he's unaccustomed to the quirks of collectible cars, like when your Ferrari 458 blows an oil hose and catches fire.He also admits he's a little confused by the latest gadgets on his cars: PS: I probably should not tell the forum, that on some cars I cannot even figure out some of the "gizmos" That is okay the cars perform just as well!So it's probably best for all involved that Adams focus his attentions on vehicles with fewer hidden switches and a gently used ZR1 find a new home.Hoping to get some hivemind help this morning. Went out to the GTX this morning to go to work and the driver door wasn't opening. Thinking it was frozen shut, I tried the passenger door, got it to open without any trouble, then slid over to the driver's seat. The driver's door wasn't opening from the inside, either. Then I noticed the door lock wasn't entirely up. I pulled on the lock (these locks have always been hard for me to operate by pulling up on them — I normally use the key) and it seemed to move up a bit, but I don't think it's in the fully unlocked position, but I can't pull it up any further.

Using the key on the outside of the door will lower the lock, but it won't raise the lock. While inside the car, it sounds like the door handle is moving components inside the door, and it sounds very much like the passenger door doing the same thing. This leads me to believe it's the lock itself that is broken and preventing the door from opening. sliding glass doors qatarBut I can't get the door card off to inspect because the door won't open. double glazing doors kentThe GTX is parked in an underground garage right now, so I'm really crossing my fingers that the lock mechanism was frozen or something and it'll be defrosted by the time I leave work.solid wood door edmontonIt is said that no matter how secure something is, it is rarely, if ever, impregnable. buy internal doors adelaide

From the Wild West-style baddies that tunnel under a bank to burglars that furtively creep in when a door is ajar, there is almost an infinite variety of ways for criminals to get in unwanted places. If we’re looking at a single person attempting to gain access to a residential dwelling, however, their options are significantly more limited. Here, we’re taking a closer glimpse at how intruders enter houses and flats by force (with some common-sense recommendations on how to prevent this from happening to you). With a few key exceptions, the average burglar is likely to be someone who is fairly desperate: in short, they might be desperate to fund their drug addiction, get a loan shark off their back, or fund a criminal lifestyle. This profile — though perhaps overly simplistic — remains tremendously useful, because it means that your typical burglar is an opportunist, and is also ill-equipped to deal with any proper security measures. Due to their circumstances, they will be forced to use improvised tools and a desperate (and therefore sloppy) approach may leave excellent forensic evidence, which of course, is useful to us.

Entry and egress: taking the easy way out and in To ensure that we take adequate precautions against this activity, it’s quite helpful to take a very close look at how criminals force themselves into private residences. An increasingly common modus operandi (MO) for domestic burglary is the europrofile lock technique. The use of this has drastically risen in Britain over the last five years, principally due to the manufacturers of new housing using cheap locks in their doors. The suspect takes a set of mole grips and places them over the lock barrel. With a turn, a bump and a snap, the bolt in the door lock shatters, rendering it inoperative. The door, handle and lock appear undamaged on a cursory inspection. The suspect then can gain access. This is a fantastic reason to make sure your home security is adequate: an experienced thief can get in this way, leaving minimal mess, in less than thirty seconds. A more uncommon, but still utilised method is a bump key. A bump key is a special key that has been filed down to allow it to penetrate most of the pins in any particular lock, if it is whacked in to place.

These have to be specially made, and won’t work on highly-secure locks. Nonetheless, it affords a thief a means of rapid access. Watching them in action is very worrying indeed. Forced entry is next on the list. Operational police officers have told us they’ve seen examples of thieves kicking through a thin external wall down between a shed mounted to the exterior of a building to gain access. But more common is attacking the front door itself, usually with a jemmy or crowbar. This technique literally uses physical force to prise the door open, but leaves a lot of mess, is noisy and attracts unwanted attention. Tell-tale marks that a jemmy has been used includes bent locks, a splintered or warped door-frame, and lots of debris. The final, and crudest method for getting in the door, is brute force. It is surprisingly easy to kick a wooden door with a flimsy lock down, but again — it’s messy and noisy. Less so is a modern UPVC door, most of which have a steel core. In this case it is easier for a thief to kick a panel through in the bottom or top half of the door, and crawl through, rather than attacking the lock or frame directly.

The most uncommon technique here would be the use of a battering ram. Operational officers report that this MO is extremity rare. Windows too can be attacked in a variety of ways. The most common MO here, after the sneak in, is to use some sort of tool to prise them open. Here, we’re looking at a crowbar or jemmy again. Thieves also use screwdrivers, to remove the beading from the frame, and literally pull the window out of its mounting. Sometimes, although more rarely, a glass cutting tool can also be used. These methods are fairly quiet and discreet as they cause minimal damage and aren’t immediately obvious on a casual inspection. More brute force methods include the obvious brick through the window. The advantage for the thief here is that he doesn’t have to carry anything to the crime scene; a rock from the victim’s own patio is commonly used. The disadvantage is of course the noise made. It’s useful for forensic investigators, as using smashed windows as a point of entry usually means there is lots of nice jagged glass lying around that the thief might cut themselves on.

If they do, they’ve incidentally left some fairly irrefutable trace evidence, in the form of their DNA at the crime scene. The destroyed window may even retain a few fingerprints, or tear a few fibres from the suspect’s clothes. The final category here in our forced entry section encompasses every other way a thief could force access to your dwelling. Don’t worry about locking or shutting your first floor windows? Well you should, because thieves can and often do drag your wheelie bin to the side of your kitchen, climb onto your flat roof, and gain access that way. Other ways burglars enter using less obvious methods include the removal of roof tiles, attacking masonry from a secluded spot with a hammer, chisel or industrial tools, or even digging elaborate tunnels! Determined thieves have even been known to dismantle chimneys to gain access to attic spaces or the body of houses. As we said earlier, the possibilities for a determined thief are almost infinite. Although uncommon for residential houses, commercial premises are often ram raided, which involves driving a vehicle through a wall or shutter to gain access to a building.

Again, it has even been known for minor explosives or welding equipment to be used to gain access. Walling it up: the take-away lessons Unless a house has been specifically targeted for some high value jewellery or your fancy vehicles, it’s most likely, when looking at household burglary, that it’s been carried out by an opportunist. They won’t have been careful, and are likely to have been rushed, so there’s some fantastic potential to lift trace evidence and catch a suspect. The second thing is to make sure every lock in your house has been upgraded. Make sure you’re safe in your own home and keep windows and doors secured at all times. Remember: the single most common MO for domestic burglary remains the sneak in, where no force at all is used. Your Turn: Think we’ve missed out a few more significant methods of gaining entry? Know a few home security tips you’re happy to share with others? Do us a favour and leave them in the comments. We might even be able to add them to future articles.