Good article; the safe you buy depends on the money you have and its real purpose.
If you just need to keep kids safe or do you have serious break-in problems.
Reference.
Yes every burglar carries an angle grinder and is not worried making a lot of noise.
Every body leaves there safe out in the middle of a large room allowing unlimited access to the sides.
Given enough time and the right tools one can get into anything.
Most burglars are the smash and grab type get in grab what ever is loose and get out.
Research UL (Underwriters Laboratories) TL ratings to get real ratings on safes. A TL30x6 stops 99% of bad guys, but no safe or vault is 100%.
Locks only keep honest people honest.
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.
Gun safes are designed to keep children and liberals from hurting themselves.
I had to break into my own safe when the electronics failed. Wasn’t that hard. Medium duty Liberty safe. Never buy a safe without a mechanical key back-up. Lesson learned.
Of course no safe is 100% and that is why there should always be a decoy safe. A small and easy to break or take safe with nothing of value in it. Thief will think they got the goods and be gone quickly.
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....
Reminds me of the old motorcycle helmet ad.
If you have a $10 head, get a $10 helmet.
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.
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.