Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Gun Safes. My Quandary!

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.