Choosing a home safe to store your growing collection of investment-grade antiques is a wise decision. A safe is an economical alternative to insurance, providing decades of protection via a one-time payment – the purchase price. However, the kind of safe you buy is incredibly important.
There are a lot of safes on the market – mostly imports from China – that are poorly constructed using sub-standard materials. These inferior safes will not live up to their security promises. To have peace of mind, it is necessary to purchase a safe that excels in three critical attributes: a tight door gap, high-quality welds and good bolt support.
When a safe is compromised in a home burglary, it almost always happens via one of five different ways. The most prevalent method involves a thief removing a safe that hasn’t been properly bolted down to the floor and opening it later at his hideout.
The next most common way is a brute-force pry attack against the door. The third way is a brute-force sledgehammer attack against the door or body of the safe. The fourth technique employs power tools like angle grinders or circular saws against the body of the safe.
The final and least common attack uses a cutting torch to cut a hole in the safe. The last two methods mentioned – power tools and cutting torches – are relatively rare and tend to only be used by professional or semi-professional gangs who like to hit commercial rather than residential targets. So the illicit entry methods we have to primarily guard against in a home safe, assuming it has been properly bolted down, are the two brute-force possibilities: pry attacks and sledgehammer attacks.
Door gap is one of the most easily discernible build quality aspects of a safe. As the name implies, it is the space between the door frame and the edge of the door when the safe is closed. The tighter the tolerances and overall build quality of a safe, the tighter the door gap will be.
Unfortunately, with the proliferation of cheap Chinese import safes, the door gap on the average safe available in most big box stores today is atrociously wide. Wide door gap makes a safe much more susceptible to a pry attack because it is far easier to insert the edge of a large crowbar or breaker bar into such a large space.
A secondary concern is that an excessive door gap can render an otherwise fireproof safe extremely sensitive to heat and smoke in the event of a fire. For example, a mid-sized home safe with a door 18″ wide and 20″ high that has a fairly modest 1/8″ door gap exposes 7 square inches of net opening around the perimeter of the door. This is a fairly large area that cannot be easily sealed in the event of a fire, exposing the interior contents of the safe to damaging smoke and heat.
And door gap can easily be substantially larger than 1/8 of an inch. In extreme cases door gap can even approach an outrageous 1/2 inch wide! Conversely, you may barely be able to slide a credit card into the door gap of a very well built safe.
The next important aspect of home safe construction is weld quality. A safe is essentially just a steel box that has been welded together. So weld quality has important implications for the security of a safe for obvious reasons. If a safe is constructed with cheap, flimsy spot welds instead of more expensive and robust continuous welds, it is far more fragile overall. This makes cheap, improperly welded safes very susceptible to brute force sledgehammer attacks. In extreme cases, a poorly made safe can literally disintegrate into its component steel plates during an aggressive sledgehammer assault.
The final crucial characteristic of safe construction is good bolt support. The bolts engage the door frame of a locked safe, preventing the door from opening. However, many import safe manufacturers have resorted to saving money by making these bolts too short and anchoring them to an inadequate 12 gauge (0.1046 inches thick) or thinner steel support bar. These shortcuts are generally not visible to the consumer unless the inside door panel is removed to allow inspection of the interior boltwork.
Instead, these unscrupulous safe companies will manufacture safes with large numbers – sometimes dozens – of bolts to give the impression of being pry-proof. However, the number of bolts is largely irrelevant to the security of a safe. Generally only two or three bolts are really needed to properly secure the door of a well-designed and manufactured safe.
Inadequate boltwork or bolt support makes a safe extremely vulnerable to pry attacks. Short bolts mean the door frame can often be bent far enough out of line for the stubby bolts to clear the damaged frame. And a flimsy supporting bolt bar will usually fail from prying well before its attached bolts. On the other hand, a high quality home safe with long bolts and good bolt support is quite resistant to pry attacks, even with only two to four bolts securing the door.
A high quality home safe can be a great complement to an impressive collection of fine art or antiques. It can provide protection against both theft and fire while also giving you peace of mind. But it is vitally important that you buy a safe with a tight door gap, high-quality welds and good bolt support. These attributes often make the difference between a good safe that will perform exactly as you expect it to and a poor safe that will fail just when you need it most.
