Most of us looking to secure high value items – like cash, jewelry or bullion – are also operating on a strict budget.
Floor safes are the natural solution to this conundrum. These safes are installed directly in the concrete slab in your basement (or ground floor, if your house doesn’t have a basement). Because they are encased in solid concrete, floor safes offer superlative security at a very reasonable cost.
But today I want to talk about a very specific floor safe – the AMSEC Star floor safe. These floor safes are one of the world’s most secure residential safes. They are a perfect choice for the homeowner looking for a high security safe at an affordable price.
Once installed, the door of a floor safe is the only part that is exposed. So assuming proper installation, the security of a floor safe is commensurate with the security of its door. Luckily, the AMSEC Star floor safe’s round, lift-out door is reminiscent of a miniature bank vault.
This is where AMSEC Star floor safes crush the competition. Their round door is more or less a giant steel hockey puck that weighs in at an impressive 20 pounds (just over 9 kilos for our Canadian friends). But in order to truly appreciate just how secure these masterpieces of the safe industry are, we must first understand how they are constructed.
AMSEC starts off with an ingot of tough, A36 steel that is machined into a solid cylinder approximately 7.5 inches wide by 1.75 inches thick. A tiny hole is then drilled completely through the center of the door in order to accommodate the spindle, a narrow metal rod that connects the dial on the front of the door with the locking mechanism at the back.
A small, 3-inch diameter circle is then counter-bored partway into the rear of the safe head, centered on the spindle hole. This excavated space is where the guts of the safe’s mechanical combination lock is installed. Because it is on the back of the safe door, this area is not visible or accessible when the safe door is locked.
This unique construction explains why AMSEC advertises its Star floor safes as only being C-rate (which is defined as having a 1-inch thick steel door), even though most of the door is fully 1.75 inches thick. In fact, out of the safe head’s total surface area of 44.2 square inches, only 7.1 square inches, or 16% of the safe door, is protected by the thinner, 1-inch thick layer of steel. The other 84% of the safe door is a monolithic, 1.75-inch thick steel plug.
Photo Credit: AMSEC
But this technically-correct application of the C-rate burglary standard overlooks a multitude of mitigating factors that make AMSEC Star floor safes significantly more secure than their C-rate designation would imply. In reality, AMSEC Star floor safes are comparable to free-standing TL-15 safes in terms of security, but at a fraction of the cost.
In order to illustrate this, let’s talk for a moment about how you would theoretically try to crack an AMSEC Star floor safe.
Attempting to intuit the lock combination via traditional, manipulation-style safe-cracking is futile. Every AMSEC Star floor safe comes with a manipulation-resistant, Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Group 2 mechanical lock. Even better, this same lock used to carry the higher security, UL Group 1 certification. It is a proven design that has been seasoned over many decades. And although the lock no longer possesses the UL Group 1 listing, it is still made to the same technically demanding standards.
In other words, unless you are an internationally-renowned master safe-cracker, there is no way you are getting into an AMSEC Star floor safe in a reasonable amount of time by manipulating the lock.
Any attempt at prying the safe open is futile. AMSEC Star floor safes have a solid, 1/2-inch thick steel collar that is engineered to accept the door with almost no play whatsoever. This results in a gap between the precision-machined door and the tight-fitting collar of only a few hundredths of an inch – about 1 mm. A burglar has no opportunity to even attempt a pry attack because it is impossible to fit a tool into this almost non-existent door gap.
Sledgehammer attacks are also doomed to failure. This is because a sledgehammer attack relies on breaking the seams of the safe body or collapsing the door frame. AMSEC Star floor safes have 1/4-inch thick, continuously welded steel bodies and robust, 1/2-thick solid steel frames and collars. In addition, the body, frame and collar are all encased in hundreds of pounds of concrete during installation, providing even more protection. As a result, all a sledgehammer attack will do is activate one or more of the safe’s relockers, making it even harder to open.
An enterprising burglar may attempt a drill attack. This approach seems enticing when one considers that the lock mechanism is “only” protected by 1 inch of steel. However, it is important to note that this is twice the steel thickness of a typical floor safe door. Furthermore, there is a nasty surprise in store for anyone foolish enough to try to go through the “weak spot” of an AMSEC Star floor safe.
The entirety of the 3-inch diameter locking mechanism is protected by a circular, carburized hardplate. A hardplate is a specially treated alloy plate that is specifically designed to defeat drilling or cutting attacks. Hardplates from respected safe manufacturers like AMSEC typically sport a Rockwell hardness of 60 or greater. This will shatter most conventional drill bits.
But the hardplate used in the AMSEC Star floor safe is special. It employs a case-hardened disc that freely rotates on its central axis, which is the lock spindle.
This means that any cutting tool that penetrates through the 1 inch of overlaying steel to reach the hardplate will tend to skip endlessly across its spinning surface, rather than bite into it. This turns the revolving energy inherent in almost all power tools malevolently against itself. The central spindle is also highly drill and drive resistant, making it extremely difficult to disable the revolving hardplate.
Even if a criminal manages to somehow drill completely through the 1 inch of steel and the hardplate underneath it, there is a good chance that he will trip one or more of the independent steel relockers associated with each of the 3 locking bolts. And once a relocker is tripped, brute force is the only realistic way into the safe.
A burglar who wisely opts to avoid the center of an AMSEC Star floor safe door is faced with the unenviable task of drilling or cutting through 1.75 inches of forged steel. This is thicker than the E-rate security designation, which is defined as a safe door with 1.5 inches of steel. From its inception in the 1950s until the early 1990s, the E-rate classification was synonymous with the UL TL-15 rating, which is a high security, commercial safe rating.
In addition to cutting through 1.75 inches of unforgiving solid steel, a burglar would also have to contend with his circular saw, demolition saw or angle grinder hitting the safe’s round collar (and the concrete behind it). This is because the relatively small door of an AMSEC star floor safe is recessed approximately 1.5 inches below grade once installed. The curvature of the 1/2-inch thick steel collar would tend to deflect the cutting blade, making it difficult to maintain a linear cut and dramatically increasing the safe-cracking time.
Honestly, if I were a burglar facing an AMSEC Star floor safe, I would avoid the safe door altogether and try to cut the safe out of the surrounding concrete. I’m not alone in this sobering security assessment either. An AMSEC executive who regularly posts on a popular gun enthusiast forum as “TheSafeGuy“, has this to say about AMSEC Star floor safes:
“They were the favorite safe for gas stations and car washes. Every Mobile gas station in the USA had a Star lift-out door safe in the office floor at one time. Burglaries with these safes were unheard of because of the in-floor and tight-fit, lift-out door design. The only successful burglaries involved digging them out of the concrete floor with heavy equipment.”
Of course, once a thief is reduced to tearing a floor safe out of the concrete in order to open it, you know the safe manufacturer has done a superlative job. At this point, we’re talking about using loud, dangerous and exhausting tools, like heavy-duty demolition saws and jackhammers.
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Even then, the burglar had better hope that nobody comes home for several hours, because that is how long it will take him to finish the job. And if you’ve had the foresight to “enhance” your concrete pour with steel rebar or mesh, a successful burglary will take even longer.
Most burglars simply won’t bother; the effort and risk involved are simply too great. Couple this with the fact that floor safes are easily concealed and usually reside in a part of the house that criminals don’t explore (the basement), and you’ve got yourself the perfect high security safe at a reasonable price.
AMSEC Star floor safes come in two different body versions: a cylindrical body and a rectangular body. The former are cheaper, but have less storage capacity. The latter are more expensive, but provide more storage.
Prices for cylindrical Star floor safes start at just under $600 (for the C3 model, with 0.16 cubic feet of storage space) and top out at a little less than $750 (for the C7 model, with 0.45 cubic feet of space). They are perfect for valuables that don’t take up much room, like cash, junk silver, gold coins or other high value density items.
Rectangular body Star floor safes have prices that range from around $750 (for the B6 model, with 0.36 cubic feet of usable space) to a bit over $1,100 (for the B24, with 1.26 cubic feet of space). I like these square body safes better, as they give you a lot more room to work with for only a modestly higher price.
All pricing is current as of January 2019.
A good rule of thumb is to always buy a safe that is substantially larger than you think you will need. And this advice goes doubly for floor safes due to the difficulty of installation. After all, if you find out a few years after buying one that you need more space, there is no easy (or cheap) way to remedy the situation.
As a final bonus, every AMSEC Star floor safe is made in the United States. This is an important consideration because the build quality of imported safes – particularly those originating from China – is often suspect. Both the material and build quality of domestically manufactured, U.S. made safes are invariably higher than that offered by cheap foreign imports.
About the only drawback that Star floor safes have is their relatively small, 7.25 inch diameter circular door opening. If you need to store bulky or awkwardly shaped valuables, this is less than ideal. In that case, it might be wise to cross-shop Hayman floor safes, which have a larger, rectangular door that can be upgraded to 1-inch thick or 1.5-inch thick steel for an additional fee.
Despite this one minor shortcoming, AMSEC Star floor safes are far superior in terms of security to any other C-rate floor safe on the market today. In my opinion they are the best, most secure floor safe currently available in North America. This is validated by the fact that the safe’s unique, round-door design has remained basically unchanged since its original development in the late 1940s. Although any safe can be opened with the right tools and enough time, Star floor safes offer exceedingly high security for a surprisingly affordable price.
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