Making your Home Blast or Bullet resistant

[knuckle Head]

Ok some may say I went off the deep end on this one, but with world events being what they are and drive by shooting happening everywhere these day not just in inner cities ganglands, what are methods we can share with one another??

I saw several years ago of company using a spray on pickup truck bed liner to make center block wall adhere to one another better and making them somewhat blastproof, remember because there is always a round or explosive out there that is stronger than your wall.

But for the average homeowner not living in afull blown combat zone, what methods are available to us, when american lived in log homes, the logs worked as a good barried between people and bullets, now most homes are build out thin material a 30-30 could go right through.

Here is one product I came across about the centerblcok walls, <broken link removed>

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[mjbskwim]

Sand bags
There was a thread on here last summer? about this.Someone (blitzkrieg I believe) posted a video about bullets penetrating rooms .And the sand bags were the best bet

But unless you have the money to do bullet proof windows or a family that's OK with,basically living under ground,it pretty hard to make your home bullet proof.
Maybe concrete walls would slow things down?

 

[zers]

Use phone books as insulation?

 

[Key-Hay]

Mythbusters did this. I think Line-X is missing a whole new market!!!

☢ Bomb Proof Truck Bed-Liner - YouTube

 

[Angie]

Interesting. I never considered this. My house currently (that we are trying to sell) is 18" adobe walls. Lots of windows though. I'd guess the corners are pretty safe from bullets, but with all those windows, probably not so much. Good reason to consider a log home when we move, I suppose.

 

[Squidly]

Look up ICF construction. Put more steel in the concrete, add a blast resistant elastomer coating... but that would have to be a new house. Or you could live in a bunker in the mountains.

sq

 

[Mark W.]

just dig a trench around the house and use the material to create a 10' high berm with 70 degree sides. around the house. Works for castles should work for a house.

 

[Decker]

just dig a trench around the house and use the material to create a 10' high berm with 70 degree sides. around the house. Works for castles should work for a house.

As a bonus all the Mosquitos breeding in the moat will help keep people away. I like the idea!

 

[Thebastidge]

I bought this: The Secure Home: Joel M. Skousen: 9781568610559: Amazon.com: Books

Kind of expensive, but has some good, and some over-blown ideas. One of his ideas is to add reinforcement to walls with plywood and using an opening cut into the top of the wall bettwen each set of studs to pour pea-gravel into the existing structure.

For windows, there's really no security option against bullets other than steel-core shutters, and those only help when they're closed. You could tell people they're for storm protection. In Iraq, we had a mortar explode on the top of a concrete T-wall (Texas barrier like you see in between lanes on the highway, only 12' tall) and a piece of shrapnel went through both sides of a steel conex next to the T-wall, some of the boxes inside the conex, and left a dent in the side of the next conex. A conex is 3/8" mild steel, I believe. So that irregular piece of shrapnel went through basically an inch of mild steel. A regular-shaped conical FMJ rifle round would be even more effective.

There are plastic films you can add to a window (they do occlude the sunlight to a certain extent, so if you're trying to use natural daylight and passive solar, be aware of that) which will prevent a smash and grab. They actually make it quite difficult to smash a usable hole in a window, but it can still be done with a few uninterrupted minutes. Doesn't make the window "unbreakable" or anything. Absolutely won't stop a bullet. You still have to replace the window after a break-in attempt.

We talked about sandbagging your house last summer, sure. But I am going to say it again: sandbagging is EXTREMELY labour intensive. It takes a great many sandbags to cover a wall. You can't just stack them in a single line. It takes a great deal of time AND strength AND energy (meaning calories, meaning food you have to burn in your body when food may be better conserved) to fill sandbags.

If you haven't been on a military or emergency volunteer detail filling sandbags at some point in your life, I challenge you to do this: Next time you go to the beach, take a couple shovels and 50 sandbags. Fill them and stack them in a line 5 high. See how long it takes you, *how little that actually would cover*, and how tired you are when finished. Now figure the effort at your home is probably greater because you don't have all that LOOSE sand, and you need THOUSANDS of them to surround your house. (the average sandbag is no more than 3-4 inches high when stacked. You need to leave enough room to tie off or fold over the top when stacking, and they have to be light enough for your weakest worker to lift them.) Suppose you want a sandbag wall 6 feet high, by 75 feet long. Call the sandbag dimension 3"x12". They must be stacked at least doublewide for stability. How many sandbags do you need for one side of your house? 6*75=450 sq feet. Each Sandbag = .25ft high *1 ft long or 1/4 sq ft. 450 sq ft * 4 sandbags/sq ft = 1800 sandbags x 2 deep for stability = 3600 sandbags for one side of your house.

You will not have time to do it in an emergency without a great many hands. Even with a great many hands, there are better things (higher priority) to do in an emergency. And sandbags require maintenance. You don't just sandbag a position once and leave it alone for years. The fill material washes out, the bags deteriorate and rip/spill. They sag, and lean, and eventually the sandbag walls fall over.

The average urban/suburban home is simply not a defensible position and cannot be made into one. You rely upon the civilization of your neighbourhood to be safe. You rely upon the police, the restraint of criminals who fear being caught, and the basic decency of most people. You rely upon the fire department, the water department, and the electric utility for the basics of survival.

None of that works well in a long-term disaster scenario that actually pits people one against each other for basic survival necessities.

 

[mjbskwim]

You could add lexan to your windows,the stuff they laminate into bullet proof glass.But again you are talking big $ $60 and up for a 4X8 sheet?

Bastidge,I under stand the math for the sand bags,just an idea. And they do work to stop bullets.
Really if you were contemplating sand bags for the near future,you should have started filling them a couple years ago.And palitizing them for easy placement.
I did sand bags while covering new roadway on the Narrows. I was late 40s.Didn't like it much at all. We had people filling them constantly.

As the 2 stories from over seas say,you need to have your entire block working together in the city.You can't survive very well on your own.
I believe if you truly think you need bomb protection at your present location,you may think of moving.

 

[Thebastidge]

To paraphrase MJB: the time to organize your neighbourhood watch is two years ago. Not just useful in the Zombie Apocalypse. Every day is a good day to know the character of your neighbours.

Sandbags won't do much good against molotov cocktails, either.

I'm planning to build my next home within 2 years. I'm using Skousen's book as well as Daniel Chiras' book on Passive Solar for my planning: Daniel Chiras: Solar House

I'm leaning very heavily towards building a cob house: Cob House books on Amazon

Above, somone mentioned adobe. Cob is essentially the same only not sun-baked into bricks before building. You build the wall as a single monolithic structure, which adds a lot to the structural integrity. As long as the roof properly protects it, you can build it in nearly any environment that doesn't get snow piled up against the wall, and it integrate with passive solar heating/cooling as well, it's fireproof (depending in part upon your roofing materials) and bulletproof. Building with security doors and window shutters make it pretty resistant to willd animals, crime, or zombies. But the biggest benefit is full-time comfort, organic building styles that appeal to the primitive in us and largely eliminate those things about modern buldings which contribute to our ill health, greatly lowered building cost, and greatly lowered operating cost in terms of utilities. Rather than a brute force approach to heating and cooling, it uses natural physical principles to average out the temperature swings of the daily and yearly solar cycle. Integrates well into off-grid lifestyles.

 

[Mark W.]

As a bonus all the Mosquitos breeding in the moat will help keep people away. I like the idea!

nah to keep the skeeters down just flaot a nice layer of motor oil on the surface of the water. A simple propan torch will work as a lighter should added deterant become required. Works best when the zombies are half way through the moat.

 

[bruzer]

Fill your walls with sand instead of insulation.
Good luck and stay safe,
Mike

 

[Thebastidge]

Sand or pea gravel requires reinforcement. It's too heavy for drywall.

 

[slightly disturbed]

in my basement,I took down the drywall and added 3/8 plywood and then filled my walls with sand. The front of my house has the 70s red brick in front, so that helped a little. The lower front half of my house is underground, so there is a concrete wall about 4ft high on the inside. On top of that I did a cinder block wall filled with rebar and sand.

 

[NiceAsh]

We recently took over a building that was formally a credit union. We took out the bullet proof glass from the drive up window. As we were working on that I realized that yes, the glass may be bullet resistant, but that stick frame and drywall on either side is sure not. Really is a false sense of security when someone could just move a few inches to the side of the window and fire through the wall.

 

[knuckle Head]

Hey lots of great ideas, I am trying a get a transfer, well have been for a year now, I am wanting to build my next home.

I always wanted a log home, I lived in concrete army barracks before I never liked it, but am thinking of a mix, log home, reinforced concrete basement walls, eith concreted or center blcok garage walls, if I go center block I would rebar the innards and pour in concrete, then spray them with bedliner.

I also want a small detached work shop that i could build first while I do the log home, that way I could much of th elabor myself and save some cash.

But i want to make it a burglar proof, blast resistant and bullet resistan as possible, while not haveing the feeling like I am living a bunker, I did that in the army and I never really liked it.

Lots of great ideas peoplel ets keep this one going

 

[Blitzkrieg]

Insulated Concrete Forms.. plan to build one very soon

You can build it any way you like.. adobe, castle, Tudor, conventional looks.. the basic building goes up like lightning. R value off the charts and fireproof as well

 

[Thebastidge]

Fort Knox isn't "burglar proof". Security is a dynamic goal, not a static one.

When I lecture on IT security (which I find myself doing a lot, bear with me a moment) I often start out a point with the following:

"Information Systems are people, processes, and technology. Don't get overly hung up in the technology."

That point, slightly modified, is highly relevant to this discussion. The technology is arguably the least part. Just like we talk about with concealed carriers in my firearms classes: better to avoid the sketchy part of town than to rely on your firearm to get you out of trouble in the sketchy part of town. The further 'upstream' in the decision tree you can make yourself safe, the cheaper and more effective your efforts will be.

Where you live probably matters FAR more than how you build your home. How you live your life comes next. Cultivating good relationships and avoiding bad ones is even more important. Most crime is prepetrated on criminals by other criminals known to them. Avoid associating with criminals and you avoid the vast majority of crime.

Of course random victimization DOES occur, and you should be prepared for it. But understanding the risks is important to generate realistic, cost-effective risk management strategies. I would move some *place* that is safer before I would spend a lot of money (and time, and effort) trying to retro-fit an inherently unsecure house in a sketchy neighbourhood to be safer, or one that looks poised to become a bad neighbourhood (which includes ANY big city downtown situation if our economy keeps circling the toilet bowl.)

 

[Thebastidge]

The other thing to consider is defense in depth. Security starts at your perimeter, not at the walls of your home. In teaching the NRA's Refuse to be a Victim Seminar, we talk about strategies to keep the threat further out. Fences, thorny hedgerows, signage.

For bullet defense, it would take an earthen berm or concrete fence. Both rather expensive and obvious. It you do decide to do something like that, it would probably behoove you to make the defensive measure serve double duty.

Instead of dedicated (and obvious) security bollards made of concrete or steel, how about concrete planters filled with dirt that double as raised beds? Or even one made of gravity blocks- I built a couple raised beds of these at my mom's house a couple years ago. It would take concerted, uninterrupted effort to get rid of these. These are particularly effective against vehicle attacks and accidents (no BS, a car drove into the front room of a house near mine a couple years ago.)

A raised berm in some locations could be planted with a coppicing shrub for concealment, additional noise abatement, wind barrier and discouragement to foot traffic, while making it more diffult to shoot into the house from a distance.

Push the security perimeter out as far as you practically can. It's a balance between keeping the threat away and keeping your resources concentrated enough to be effective, while keeping in mind that in 99% of all scenarios you are eventually going to have to answer legally for any violence or interference with right-of-way.