Buying Gun Safes for Home Safety-part 2
Buying Gun Safes for Home Safety
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What To Look For – Doors
Now let’s look at doors. As mentioned before, most safe doors use steel that’s sufficiently thick and hard enough to resist most types of direct attack for a reasonable period of time. First, you want to see whether the door hinges are located inside or outside of the safe. If they’re outside, the door opens 180 degrees which is preferable. Now many manufacturers of safes with outside hinges will tell you how strong they are, how thick, how hard, etc. etc. The truth is IF they have stationary hinges on the hinge side the burglar cannot get into the safe anyway.
You also want the door with at least 4 bolts on the two sides and top and bottom preferably. If the safe has bolts all the way around, even though the outside hinges are removed, the door will still be locked in place by the bolts.
Let me also make a quick observation about the number of door bolts. Generally speaking more is better. However, things can be overdone. I’ve seen safes with 27 bolts. Do all those bolts provide a proportional amount of protection to their cost, probably.
Eight bolts on a door work just fine, and 12 is better still. Anything over 12 is awesome of course.
As far as the diameter of the bolts are concerned, as usual, it’s a size thing.
I’ve seen good safes where the bolts are 9/16’s of an inch. However, in this day and age, you should be able to get one inch bolts on just about any half way decent safe. 1.5” bolts are about as big as they get on home gun safes. In summary, we want outside hinges and at least 8 one inch locking bolts going all the way around the door is preferable.
What To Look For – The Lock
The combination wheel mounted to the outside of the door is connected by a shaft to an inside locking mechanism. It is extremely important that the inside mechanism be well protected as thieves will often attempt to completely drill out the device in order to either destroy it and/or render it inoperable.
The inside locking mechanism contains a small bolt that engages the gears that operate the large locking bolts that go around the door. When this locking bolt is in place, the gears in the door can’t move. Consequently, most quality safes will have a small, hardened steel plate on the inside of the door directly in front of the combination lock mechanism to protect it from someone drilling through.
A hardened plate will definitely provide an additional degree of protection to the mechanism. However, if a thief has the time and the tools, the lock mechanism can be eventually drilled out, but it will take a good amount of time, with our safes we use a Rockwell 60 hardplate the is 1/2″ thick which keeps the drilling at bay.
The inside locking mechanism should also be equipped with a relocker. This is a feature with a sensor that automatically secures the door in the locked position when someone tries to drill or punch out the lock. It’s one more layer of security protecting the door, we use TWO relockers per door.
The outside combination lock wheel should also have a steel protective collar around it to insure a large pipe wrench can’t be attached to the dial and the mechanism broken open by twisting.
Along the same lines, the outside door handle or star wheel should have a clutch mechanism on it to allow it to slip if someone applies excessive force by slipping a pipe over it and uses it as a giant lever to attempt to break the locking mechanism.
Lastly, be sure that the door is equipped with at least a UL rated type II combination with a key lock.
article continued on page 3…
Please call me if i can help you out in your decision on buying your gun safes
Thank you -
Chris Guerra
Direct: 510.397.1151
Toll Free: 800-656-4143 x2000
article courtesy of: Todd Spotti
Filed Under: Blog • Gun Safes • Private Security Products • Vault Doors
