On 8/9/2011 9:40 PM, Tom wrote:
Hi, all ..

Sorry for the long post, but I'm trying to find a medium size, non-
electronic safe for storing documents, titles, family keepsakes,

cash, coins, gold nuggets (I wish), diamonds (I wish), that sort of
stuff. I don't need a five footer; no rifles or shotguns that I

need to store (I keep mine under the bed; no kids).

My present safe is a mechanical dial-turning thingy (Sentry) with a
special round key for the handle. The safe is bolted to the

concrete foundation. I'm happy with it, but it's too small.

I've looked around on the Web for quite a while, with not much success.
My research tells me that it's not hard to break into an

electronic safe, even for a novice with just a screwdriver and a piece of
wire.

The safe will be in a corner, so it will be hard to get to the back of it
without breaking through a plaster wall. So the

screwdriver/wire thing with an electronic safe may be a little more
difficult. But I just want a spin dial, old-fashioned safe.

I've worked in defense companies with classified info for many a year,
and the mechanical safe approach was good enough for the DoD.

Why not me?

Tom


Good spam filters at Kendra, BTW, and Xnews uses news.1dial.com server,
whatever that is.

Should I just start dodging now? 8-)grin

Go to a surplus/used office supply place in a government town. GSA
class-whatever security containers are available on secondary market-
there is nothing classified about them. Or if you are rich, you can buy
them new. Here is a fun link, once I got past Google's brain-dead search
algorithm- http://www.gsacontainer.com/classes/classes.html . But the
main part of Govt. classified security isn't the safe- it is the
nit-picking procedures and logs and audit trails and forced collusion
and no-lone zones. (I'm talking vanilla below-TS, not SCIF)


For household use, I'd be more worried about fire/flood safety than
burglars. Burglars you can protect against by hiding in plain sight- a
fire/water proof cubby that blends in so well they don't even notice it.
Despite the promotional lit from safe companies and what you read in
novels, most burglars are pretty dumb, and most do NOT want to spend a
lot of time searching, unless you live in an isolated location, and they
know you are out of town and don't have an alarm system. A fake sewer
cleanout in basement wall is always good, but probably too small for
your stated needs. A dummy electrical subpanel, lined with fireproof
material, with a locked door, would probably be totally ignored. Put a
fake duct run in basement ceiling, tied into main trunk, but not really
connected. Replace the toe-kick on the bank of cabinets furthest from
kitchen sink with something held on with magnets or velcro- there is
usually room to slip a thin fire-proof box under there. Look for dead
spaces in your house where something normal looking could cover an
access hole. Lots of places to make hidey-holes. Rule number one- never
show it off to anyone, even relatives. Think like a drug dealer- DEA is
good at finding hiding spaces, but most crooks and local cops are not.

But having said all that- off-site storage is still the most secure
option. Other than escape kit (cash, passport, copy of DL, etc.) and a
valid recorded copy of your will, most of what you mentioned are what
safety deposit boxes were designed for.

-- aem sends...