Safe at home!
Do research before entrusting guns, valuables to a metal box
Gun safes look impenetrable, but many safes might not provide the protection you need.
Eli Knippenberg, general manager of Bear Safes in Oklahoma City, said that gun owners should research their options before buying a safe. The most important characteristic is the thickness of the metal.
The invincibility of many gun safes is illusory, Knippenberg said, starting with the locking system itself. Most safes have a system of stainless steel bolts that extend from the interior of the door into recesses in the body when you turn the handle. It looks impossible to break into that door.
The problem is what you don’t see behind the interior door panel. In most safes, the entire pin is just a few inches long and is connected to thin metal rods that compose the tracking system. When you turn the handle, the rods move to project and retract the pins.
“People believe — because they’ve never seen the inside of a safe — that these pins are 18 to 20 inches long, and that they’re connected to a big gear system,” Knippenberg said. “The problem is that the pin is only as long as what you see thrown out from the door. They fail because the safe body and the door body are too thin.”
Most safes are built with 12- and 14-gauge sheet metal. Some premium safes are made with 11-gauge, which is still too thin, Knippenberg said. Thin-gauge steel is flexible, and it becomes even more flexible with greater width.
Using a pry bar, Knippenberg demonstrated the weakness on a popular brand safe that’s available from many big box stores. With enough leverage, you can pop the pins from their recesses and open the door in about 10 minutes.
“Look how much that pin is moving,” Knippenberg said. “What’s a pry bar going do when you start flexing it. Once this part (the door) starts to flex, the pins will start to flex. When you see that thin-gauge steel, what the pins are connected to just isn’t strong enough.”
The normal retail price on that particular safe is $1,500.
“The reason it’s $1,500 is because it has a matted-on paint job and painted on graphics,” Knippenberg said. “You go to a store and start looking at Brownings, that’s suddenly a $2,500 safe because they put a powder-coat finish and that Browning sticker and label.
“I guarantee that Browning has never built a safe,” Knippenberg added. “Winchester has never built a safe. John Deere has never built a safe. Those companies buy rights to put their logos on there, but those safes are designed to hit a price point where people feel comfortable spending. You pay for the aesthetics.”
Knippenberg’s next exhibit was two identical safes that were bought, 20 years apart, from the same big box retailer. The older one is an excellent safe. The newer one is not.
“Same safe sold from the same store,” Knippenberg said. “Twenty years ago this was an $1,100 safe. Today it’s a $900 safe. What has gone down in price in the last 20 years? I guarantee it’s not metal.”
And metal is the difference. The older safe is made from 10-gauge steel.
“I don’t believe somebody could pry this older one open, Knippenberg said. “It’s not that the bolt system is better. It’s the steel that makes the difference. If you can’t flex the body and you can’t flex the door, you can’t put pressure on these pins, anyway.”
Today, the old $1,100 safe will cost $1,700-$2,000, Knippenberg said. That’s the price of a Beretta Silver Pigeon over/under shotgun, and nearly the price of a new Benelli Super Black Eagle.
A lower number represents greater thickness, and a higher number represents thinner. Knippenberg said that Bear safes are built of 6- to 8-gauge steel. They have no locking pins, no separate lock and no handle. The keyed lock is built into a recess in the deer at a 90-degree angle that requires the key to be inserted upside down. The key chamber is only large enough to put two or three fingers into it.
The key turns a metal pin that moves through a hole drilled into a one-quarterinch steel plate that’s welded inside the box. Some safes have one lock. Others have two.
With the right tools and enough time, a dedicated thief can defeat any safe, Knippenberg said.
“If they have metal cutting equipment — saws and torches — they are going to beat you, but they shouldn’t be able to get into a safe with crowbars and prybars.”
Fire protection is mostly smoke and mirrors, too, Knippenberg said. Many safes are labeled to provide 45 minutes to one hour of protection under a certain amount of heat, but Knippenberg said a buyer should research that aspect of a safe, as well because they are used to protect photo albums, abstracts, insurance papers, social security cards, birth certificates, and other priceless documents and memorabilia.
“Fire protection is a bigger issue than gun protection because of the severity of the loss,” Knippenberg said. “Gun guys don’t want to lose 15 or 20 guns, but ask your wife how devastating it would be to lose your whole lifetime worth of pictures of your kids.”
Many safes, regardless of their labeling, won’t protect those items.
“There’s not a fire safe built in my opinion that will give you fire rating beause none of them are UL listed for fire,” Knippenberg said. “Explain to me how a safe is fire protected when it has almost 2 inches of holes drilled through its body.” Some come with a 3/8inch hole drilled in the back to run a power cord into the box. They have a ½-inch hole in the door for the lock and a 1-inch hole in the door for the handle. Heat will enter the box through those portals.
“You have five pins on the front of the door, five in the back, two up top and two down low,” Knippenberg asked. “When 40 percent of the safe is conducting heat through those pins to the inside of the box, and when all those pins are connected to a track system which is connected to a door, how do you have fire protection when 40 percent of the safe is generating heat behind the fire insulation to the inside of the box?”
Remember the book Fahrenheit 451? That’s a key number when evaluating safe protection, Knippenberg said because 451 degrees is the ignition point for paper.
“Once paper ignites, it’s game over,” Knippenberg said. “Everything in a safe is going to burn.”
To improve your odds, Knippenberg recommends storing paper items in a small fire box inside your safe.
“You can get them anywhere for a couple hundred bucks, and some of them are pretty good,” Knippenberg said. “Again, do your research.”
Knippenberg recommends visiting sheetrock.com to research the insulating properties of gypsum and fireboard. The Internet also has a rich library of videos from safe owners that show how their safes stood up to fire.