So it is time that I buy a gun safe. I have become increasingly frustrated with having most of my firearms at my Parent house and having to go out of my way to get them just to go to the range.

So After spending sometime on Craigslist and backpage looking at used safes that were not all that impressive I decided that buying new was the way to go.

I went to Cabela's, Sportsman's Warehouse and finally checked out Costco.com.

I planned on spending about 600.00 at 1st and soon realized that safes in that range were not very impressive. However after much thought and reading on the interweb I decided to pull the trigger on the Bighorn that Costco currently has on sale for 619 delivered to my door. For my money I thought it was the best I could do. Though the thought of buying a safe with out 1st fondling it made me a bit queezy.

On a whim I went to a local safe store on the way home from work. I spoke to the guy and maybe I got suckered in to a good sales pitch.... but after looking at some of the safe there that had been beaten up I was convinced that I made the wrong choice at Costco. I am home and and I have already called and Canceled the order.

So Now I am here asking for advice. (by advice feel free to call me stupid or any other names that may or may not be applicable!

So here are the contenders In order of price.
Costco Bighorn 19ecb 619.00 to my door
Champion Model T 710.00 (including tax) and I pick up (not a problem Ive got appliance dollies, and stupid friends who enjoy lifting stuff.
Champion Medalist Model m-22 (this is a 2010 model and he wants them out of his shop) 888.00 (including tax) I pick up.

I am not made of money, but I do want something that offers the best value for my dollar. the Champion Safes are made in Mexico, the Bighorn is made in China. The Champions have a reinforced door jam, the Bighorn, well I just dont know what that one offers. The Champions offer Higher and longer fire ratings with a 5 year (model T) or Lifetime on the Medalist.

I can not afford the upper models of Liberty safes and the Used Centurion I looked at wasnt as well built as the Champion (I thought)

Where would you spend the money?

Thanks for reading my A.D.D riddled post!

Not a bad buy, but probably depends on how MUCH security do you need.

Here's a pic of the Bighorn.




Features:

I honestly didn't think it was either, but for whatever reason I am super paranoid about having my house broken in to (again) and having my gun stolen (this time). I understand with any safe all you are buying is TIME. While I think I would be happy with the Bighorn. the Model T at 90 dollars more I think is a better buy, but only by a slim margin.

The fire rating on the Champions buys more time. 4 holes for bolts in the the Champion buys more time (Bighorn only has 2).

And like we all know, all we are buying is time, if the SOB wants it bad enough he will take it. I would however like him to work for it.

Having sold safes at one time in my life I have a slightly different take.

There is no gun safe I cannot get into. There is almost no gun safe I could not steal if I really wanted it. If you are not going to build it into an underground steel and thick reinforced concrete vault it can be stolen.

So get a decent fire resistant safe that is big enough to hole all your guns, bolt it to the floor and you have done about all you can do. You can spent thousands of dollars more and it may slow me down five minutes.

BTW. Talk to your tax man but if you keep your tax records in your gun safe you may be able to wright it off.

Okay Scott, I'll bite. A 400lb safe in a basement, bolted to the floor with a one-inch thick piece of all-thread in a foot of concrete so that the safe will spin if you pry the jamb. How are you going to attack it without a torch, and if you use a torch, I've got a big-ass surprise for you.

Really! well, who knew it could make a little bit of money for you!

HA!

Peal it with a pry bar and a hydraulic device much like fire department jaws of life.

Many safes are made of mild steal and can best be attacked from the side. Some can be attacked with a cordless sawsall.

Some are locked with a lock so simple they can be opened by manipulation in a half hour or so leaving no marks or damage of any kind.

So Scott,

I understand what you are saying.

If I can assume I am guessing you are saying buy the Bughorn and save the cash?

You think all that is a quandary. Just wait until you get one and within a year you realize it is about half the size you really need. That quandary hits everyone that has a gun safe.

Still cannot figure out how the guns breed in the dark.

It is exactly like a shop. If I built a hundred by four hundred shop it would half as big as I needed in six months.

Found mine (~400#) on c/l for $350. (Not sure of the fire rating.)

If you have a fire, you're going to be making an insurance claim, anyway, so paying extra for a really great fire rating doesn't make sense, to me. A small fireproof box, inside, can hold valuables/papers/cash.

I am saying but a reasonable safe that will hold all your valuables with a little room to grow and don't loose any sleep over your decision.

I have been out of the lock and security industry for about 28 years so I have no clue which is the best buy today. It sounds like the Costco would be OK but the better model that was last years bight be a better buy. Just don't worry about it being able to resist a serious attack because I have yet to see one I cannot open if I really wanted to.

My gun safe is a two hundred dollar non insulated safe and it has done a great job of keeping kids and casual sticky fingered people away from my guns for nine years. I would have bough it bigger and fire resistant if I could have afforded it at the time.

Thanks Scott..

Dathan

Any time.

It should make a lot of sense to you. Most homeowners plans are woefully inadequate if you have very many guns. The same with jewelry or other small valuables. If your limit is $10000 on guns, it doesn't take long to reach that.

I had a house full of antiques and guns years ago. Had a cherry rope bed valued at ten grand and a pre civil war hutch with original glass worth almost that much. I put an insurance rider on every peace. It was not that much more and it covered replacement cost. I would think a list of your firearms and a specific rider on them would cover the cost.

One advantage of getting rid of all the clutter and living a simple life is you don't have near as much to loose.

Look at your dec sheet, I am not sure what mine says off hand about fires and firearms, but my maximum Theft claim on firearms of 1500 bucks and 200 on jewelry. I saw that and called my agent right away.

now its 10k on firearms for theft and and 5k on jewelry. Again not sure what fire losses are covered at (they are different) but Ive found out the hard way the Insurance company is never on your side and your agent is normally a spineless sack of [bleep].

I need a second mid-size safe. I am buying this one tomorrow when it goes on sale for $549. I looked it over and it's workable.

Bob

I found out the hard way that the more an insurance company can screw you the more they cam make. They are anything but your friend!

I'd go with one of the two Champions that you list. I looked up the economy Liberty safe (mid-sized/ LINK below), and the Champions have a better fire rating. As others have said, buy as much safe as you can afford. I'm referring to the quantity it will hold. My gun room is starting to look like a safe store :-). Good luck! -Tom T.

LINK:

http://www.libertysafe.com/safe-centurion-safes-ps-20.html?tab=colors

A good gun safe is a sound investment, so you are doing the right thing.

My safe was second-hand, from a trusted dear friend who was upgrading. He still has a key, just in case. The price was just north of your upper range of costs, at $900. He delivered. HEAVY and very secure, which explains the cost of shipping tonnage to distant addresses.

I am not concerned about fire protection inside the safe. I did look long and hard at the vulnerability of the various safes, their locks and doors. See YouTube videos.

Then also look at the position of your safe. Enclose/protect the back and sides, if you can, so that it cannot be tipped over on its side or back. See additional videos. These topics have been covered before in Campfire discussions, so use the Search function.

So, buy a good safe and train your mind:
always use the safe for guns and valuables
place it well, protected from smash and dash thieves
insure your home and valuables at a level you can afford

Plan on the safe holding about half of the guns they claim to hold. Scoped up the rifles take a lot more room. Guns get nicked and scratched in a safe that holds anywhere near capacity. I am glad I bought mine. It stinks to drop the change required for a pretty good one, but they are nice to have for tax papers, vehicle titles, a piece of jewelry or two. Lots of things that shouldnt be laying around. I dont have anything in my safe really worth breaking into it, but I have plenty in there that I dont want picked up of a table top or out of a drawer.

The ultimate goal is have a house with an extra room/basement that I can turn in to a safe/secure gun room/reloading center/man cave.

That would add a 1st time of defense between the safe and the guns/valuables.

The best deal I've found is Winchester safes on eBay. The prices are lower than what I've found elsewhere, and the price includes delivery to your driveway.

The safe I'm replacing is a simple fairly heavy gauge steel cabinet with a combination lock. It offers no fire protection, and probably could be pried open in just a few minutes. But it does perfectly well at keeping the grandkids' curious hands out of trouble and keeping casual thieves out.

I'd say that you'll want about twice as much capacity as you have guns. When the safe is stacked to capacity, it is hard to get guns in and out without dinging stocks.

There are fire ratings, and there are fire ratings. Some one hour safes are rated for one hour at 1200F, and some at 1400F. So you can't always compare directly.

Just because a safe is rated for an hour doesn't mean that your guns will all be OK for an hour. It means the safe won't get above a certain temperature. Whether your guns are OK or not is another issue.

Some safes have hinges on one side and locking bars on the other sides. Those are pretty easy to pry open. Safes with locking bars all around are harder to open.

The thing that is holding me up is that Winchester safes can't give me the bolt pattern in the floor. I have to get the safe here, and then put the anchors in the concrete floor. I'm going for something in the $1500 range... couldn't find something I really really liked at half that, which is where I started shopping.

My goal would be to have a gun safe bigger than my house....

Wait a minute, my gun safe may already be bigger than my house.

Fort Knox...Defender Series as a minimum.

The average burglars time-on-target is less than four minutes, at least the successful ones. Stupid ones hang around longer. Jaws might work, but Joe Burglar ain't bringin' jaws. Pry bar won't work either cause all he'll do is spin the safe in a circle, you have to have something to pry AGAINST. As for cutting a hole in 1/4 steel large enough to remove all the guns with a Dewalt sawsall, I'll believe it when I see it. A big husky/Stihl quickie saw, yeah, but that little battery chit ain't happening. I've run one enough to know.

I have opened gun safes in less than five minutes. Hell, one time I opened a post office safe in less than three. And that was doing it without harming anything.

Got be to remembering. I once got a nice little note in my service record for opening a nuclear weapons vault on a FFG in less than two minutes but I cheated. Never did tell the brass how I did it but you could have parked a missile in any one of their open mouths after they watched me do it.

The riders are too expensive. When you figure the cost monthly or yearly and what you could potentially get back, it's not worth it. IMO, this is the explanation for the proliferation of gunsafes.

It was a long time ago, seventeen years or more but I do not remember it being much more than the standard policy.

Now if my home burned the most I would loose in a couple of grand.

The riders on guns, jewelry, etc. around here, are cost-prohibitive.

I'll second the notion that no matter what you get or spend if someone really wants in they'll get it and quickly. Two years ago near me someone took a welding rig type truck and backed it up the driveway of the victim. Cranked up the generator and compressor and zipped off the top of the safe with a plasma cutter. I figure from the time they backed up till they left they probably weren't there 5 minutes, probably a lot less. It didn't say in the paper what brand of safe but I assume it wasn't a cheapy as they said they got away with 60 guns out of the safe.

Best protection in my mind is to keep what you say about your guns to a minimum and have a safe to deter someone who breaks in on a whim or for something else.

Even in a neighborhood I'm not sure how many neighbors would say anything about a service type truck with loud equipment running being there for 5 minutes.

After Katrina I no longer keep my guns all in the same house/town. Same thing for cash on hand as well.

A 4 inch grinder with a cutting wheel makes quick work of gun safes, especially if you come in from the side. I do not worry with my home owners they refuse to cover the amount of guns I have. A separate policy from another company makes sense if you have a bunch of guns.

A rider on the homeowners insurance doesn't appeal to me because I don't like the idea of having to list everything. Easy way for the gubberment to start gun registration.

But the real reason is that many of us Campfire types buy, sell and swap so often that the list would be no good in a month. Then the insurance company would be charging service fees to update the list once a week.

My ultimate goal?
To live where a safe isn't never needed.

But we can't go back in time.
I'm with Scott 100% on this.
ANY safe can be breached, given enough time and effort.
My aunt and uncle were lockpicks. They won fastest lock opening contests for years...

I've watched him open bank vaults.

All a home safe can do is discourage kids and petty theives.
And buy you some time in the event of fire.

Mine? a cheap , unlined smallish safe. ( too small for everything, but then I have added bedroom safes as well )
Enough to make the wife feel comfortable.

Exactly... I've always said that a farmer needs to calculate the area needed to store machinery - then double it.. When the very FIRST shovel touches the ground, double it again and you just might have enough room..

Use the same calcs for a gunsafe.. Trust me on this..

One other valuable (and productive) point, Doc,

....KILL thieves

GTC

...assuming the owner's not a Black Powder shooter, at which point that goes all awry.

GTC

Fixed it.

I am kind of disappointed. I figured someone would call me on opening a nuclear weapons vault. It was one of my greatest tricks.