Gun Safes... GET ONE!!

[tionico]

Wenis, if there is a suitable place to place the safe that has carpet down over a wood floor, you can find a piece of plate steel, say, half inch thick, drill a series of small holes in the plate, and use three inch sheetrock screws (get the pricier cad-plated ones.... they won't corrode), and screw it down through the carpet into the wood. Maybe either paint the bottom, or put a sheet of plastic film (say, 6 mil Visqueen) under the steel plate.... won't rust onto the carpet that way. Now you've got a thick plate secured to the floor (use at least a dozen such screws.. they have high tensile strength, and will anchor well to the underlying wood). Position the safe above the plate. Now, drill maybe four, perhaps six, holes through the bottom of the safe to clear some healthy grade 8 machine bolts... at least 3/8 diameter. Using the same bit, START a set of holes that line up with the bolt-holes in the bottom of the safe, and into the steel plate below. Next, change to the correct size bit to drill smaller holes into the plate..... then using a tap handle and a machine thread tap (matching the diameter and pitch of the aforementioned grade 8 machine bolts) tap the holes you've just drilled into the steel plate. Use rather large flat washers under the bold heads... hopefully, you've calculated the length of the machine bolts to just penetrate to the bottom of the plate.

Perhaps a slightly better variation would be to set up the machine thread holes in the plate, and the clear-holes in the safe, before attaching the plate to the floor... that way, no possibility of damaging the carpet whilst drilling the threaded holes. Set the whole thing up with a couple of 2.x 6 pieces of junk wood under the plate... and drill into the junk wood first to align the bolt holes.


Now, remove the safe and plate, place and secure the plate to the floor, then bolt the repositioned safe to the plate. Time to move? Empty the safe, unscrew the machine bolts, remove the safe, now unscrew the sheetrock screws and take your plate with you to the next place. IF you put something between the raw steel and the carpet, it will look like maybe a heavy piece of furniture was sitting in that spot.... but the carpet will be untouched. No one will ever find the screwholes that held the plate to the carpeted floor. Landlord need never know there was a gunsafe there. He'll never figure it out after you're gone..... the usual carpet cleaning between tennants will erase any sign of anything having been there......

 

[tionico]

Well gunnails, if they had got there with the bull and found the safe screwed to the six inch concrete floor with half a dozen half-inch grade eight bolts, they'd never have got the safe tipped enough to get the forks under it. And, with half a dozen 20K pound tensile bolts, there isn't a forklift made could get into the building to even try pulling the bolts up with it.


BOLT IT TO THE FLOOR

 

[gunnails]

Tionico,


I think you give wise advice when you say bolt your safe down. I can't argue that.

 

[pioneer461]

When I was working in Admin. at the PD, I was tasked to conduct a study of home intrusion alarms for a new city ordnance being considered. It took several weeks to gather data from across the US and Canada (this was late 80's, pre-internet). My results and in conducting peer review from the US & Canada through the FBI, was that home burglar alarms are false 97.4% of the time. Ninety-seven point four! If you had an employee with that kind of performance, you'd fire them.

Because that is the trend in North America, police find themselves responding to a lot of false alarms. After so many times, often at the same address over and over, officers tend to slow down their responses because they know the likelihood of a false alarm is rather high. In addition, most residential alarms are during the day time, when police staffing is at it's lowest. (The ordinance being studied was to have the city charge a fee for false alarms.)

Not only do the police officers on the street know that most alarms are false, the crooks know that as well. Those who put any thought into it, will also know about average response times to alarms by the police and how much time they should spend on the premises.

For my entire police career, people would ask which alarm service is the best. While I was an officer, it was unethical for me to answer that because one company may consider that as the police being in cahoots with the other alarm companies. Now that I'm no longer under that constraint, I can say that I have never responded to a valid Brinks alarm. In my opinion, ADT and Sonitrol will best serve you.

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[pioneer461]

With gun safes, you get what you pay for. You can pick up a cheap Homak metal storage cabinet at Bi_Mart, but that isn't a safe. Homak doesn't even call them safes. A Homak was my first "safe," and I now have 2 real safes in addition. In the Homak I keep my less valuable rifles .30-40 Krag, M44 Mosin-Nagant, etc. and various gun parts. The rest of my collection is in real safes. I secured them (including Homak) by drilling through the floor and sub-floor, using very heavy duty bolts and large washers.