Posted on 02/12/2018 5:22:37 AM PST by w1n1
Build a cinderblock shell vault, reinforced with rebar and concrete fill. Add a double stud wall inside and out with 4 layers of 1/2 inch drywall to fireproof it. Then add two liberty safe “doors” doors to the vault’s foyer with a 8hr fire door covering the “exterior” safe door in the foyer.
Fill the vault with additional gun safes and HilTi bolt those to the floor and weld the safes together, then drill and bolt together with grade 8’s from the insides of each safe........ alarm the hell out of the approach to the room and interior of the room, each door in the foyer with sequencing types of sensors to preclude surreptitious bypass . Hard line your alarm system wiring in conduit. Every connection / junction box has poor boy tampers on each screw / fastener made from “glitter” fingernail polish. After it dries the pattern is like a fingerprint. Take close up photos and store em and compare if false positive alarms occur ........
Do ALL the work yourself or the contract labor or someone they tell about your Ft Knox will visit later .
Never have your safes delivered, pick up the safes before dark and make sure your not followed home by bandits . Even be careful renting a pallet jack / heavy mover etcetera to move the heavy safes. Don’t unload in daylight ...... thru a closed garage if possible.
Anything less is gift wrap for theft and or fire at some point in time...... go big or get a HiPoint ........
Stay Safe.
At a gun show there was a demonstration on how to defeat those cheap key-less gun safe locks, the ones with a keypad. The guy slipped a card along side the outer right door edge and tripped the reset button >click<
Buy a cheap safe and put a few cheap guns in it. Toss in a tupperware full of car wash tokens.
Buy a large stand up freezer, gut interior, put gun safe inside....
1. Concealment is a great first line of defense in a home situation. I used to have a small safe bolted to the slab under the stairs of my house before I moved. I piled firebrick on the top and sides for more fire protection and then cut the bottom out of an old cardboard box and put it over the top.
2. If you can, always install the safe yourself. I know of several people who had a safe professionally installed and then professionally ripped off a few months later.
I had to install data equipment inside a Brinks Armored Truck vault during the facilities construction.
Very impressive with the multi chambered entry ways into the vault area that had walls we couldn’t drill into to mount transponders.
Bits just spun and went nowwhere.
Had to use adhesives
Poured concrete with metal like shavings mixed in.
The old bait and witch routine I see.
Good idea
I have an imposing looking gun safe with a sign on the door that says “Look up, you are already famous and on the internet. Don’t make a small crime into a big crime.” Up in the corner of the room is a security camera that records everything.
Even so, if the perp goes the trouble of breaking into the safe, which is actually not so easy as it is bolted into a corner and hard to get access to, he won’t find anything but documents and memorability. Guns are safely somewhere else.
“You wouldn’t want to put the Hope Diamond in a consumer grade gun safe, but most break-ins aren’t perpetrated by Oceans Eleven. The perps get in, take what they can grab, and leave. A gun safe works for that. It’s just there to slow them down.”
Exactly. Your normal meth head burglar is not going to spend the time to cut open a safe. My neighbors were broken into; the burglars were in and out in 1.5 minutes. They took a laptop and pulled the tv off the wall. If they had been there any longer that would have been caught.
I prefer to add ammo for weight. It's much more useful.
I don’t think I want to live where you live.
BAD idea with the car batteries. Acid fumes inside your house are not a good mix. If you like the idea of adding high mass low volume, go to a tire shop and buy their scrap tire weights. Better still, deck the floor with loaded ammo cans once you’ve bolted it down. You do have more than a couple boxes, right?
Another idea is to take an ordinary closet, back the door and inside walls with plywood, pin the hinge side, and a decent deadbolt. Chopping through the door or walls just gets to more resistant plywood. Put it on its own alarm circuit.
Reminds me of the old motorcycle helmet ad.
If you have a $10 head, get a $10 helmet.
Put some dumbbells at the bottom of the safe and run a bicycle cable through the weights and guns. If they cut a hole in the safe they won’t be able to remove the guns.
Wireless cameras are very cheap today.
I have some experience in this - on the end of preventing break ins of safes and stand alone security containers.
Thieves will buy the safe, take it apart, and figure out some way to get it in.
I had one experience in which all the thieves had to do it to drill a hole in the side of the safe, at just the right angle and position, and then insert a rod to hold a flap the certain way, and the dang door would pop right open.
The drill bit had to be less than 3/16 inches in diameter and THREE AND A HALF FEET LONG, but with a proper jig it was just less than rocket science.
A former boss of mine had her entire safe stolen while she and her husband were at work. They didn’t break into the safe while there, but dragged the whole thing out causing much damage to her stairs, carpeting and new wood floors.
I don’t know if she and her husband had guns in it although it wouldn’t surprise me if they did, but they did have their and their children’s passports birth certificates, tax returns, etc. in it.
I don’t know how it all turned out or if she ever proved it, but she suspected that the contractor they had recently hired to do work on their home or one of his employees was behind it or perhaps the woman they had come in to do house cleaning because they obviously knew where the safe was located, what their work schedule was (and her husband sometimes worked nights and was at home during the day) and they got in and out very fast and probably used a truck to haul it away. None of the neighbors saw or heard anything suspicious but wouldn’t have thought it strange to see a work truck in the driveway if they had.
Fort Knox!
“BAD idea with the car batteries. Acid fumes inside your house are not a good mix.”
A very bad idea. In grad school the lab next door bought a $300,000 spectrometer and put it over a cabinet that was used to store bottles of sulfuric acid. Within a year all the electronics were corroded.
So that would cost how much?
$10,000 to $25,000?
When dealing with professionals yes. If you have enough stuff that you are worried about professional burglars targeting your home you should invest higher grade security.
For most people they have to worry more about the neighborhood druggie or next door teenager seeing that you are gone to work.
Kicking in the door grabbing what ever and running out.
I have investigated hundreds of burglaries 99 percent are done by the smash and grab types.
Loose lips sink ships if you are in a habit of showing your stuff off and showing your security off you are opening yourself up.
There is a reason they are technically called “storage boxes” and not safes. Genuine safes have thick side and back steel. Lower end storage boxes do not.
Those cheaper storage boxes still stop 95% of theft which is commited by opportunists. Just make sure it is bolted down to the floor.
Only pros will bother taling the time and making the noise to force anentry into a storage box, and they can only do that where they are guaranteed not to be noticed and interrupted. But most pros have much bigger fish to fry than your paltry 30 gun, $20,000 collection. That may seem big to you and to the amateur, opportunistic criminals. A pro is not going to risk getting caught for chicken feed like that. They take down big scores, really valuable rare guns that are worth their while.
So a lower end “storage box” is fine 95% of the time and far better than no security at all. But springing for a genuine safe sure brings peice of mind.
I will post below with a thickness comparison.
The thin side steel on most so called safes which are really just storage boxes, is usually around 12 gauge steel. By comparison, a true safe will have 6 or 7 gauge steel everywhere but the thicker door. See the thickness comparison in my next post.
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