aemeijers wrote:
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.


Good points all. Add these ideas:

1. There are two kinds of safes (sometimes combined): Fire safes and
security safes.

A fire safe (e.g. "Sentry" brand) consists of two layers of relatively thin
steel sandwiching a one or two inch layer of concrete. This kind of safe can
be opened with a hatchet(!) by chopping a hole in the side or top. This
requires no more than fifteen minutes. (Of course thieves are not capable of
a quarter-hour of muscle exertion. It's against their religion or
something.)

2. If you have an alarm system, you can connect the safe to the system via a
teeny hole in the back of the safe (for the wires) and a magnetic switch on
the safe door. In series with all this is a secret switch.

Now, if the goblin puts a gun to your head and demands you open the safe, go
ahead. Without throwing the secret switch, a "holdup" signal is sent to your
monitoring company.

It's prudent to keep a pistol (no holster, no safety) in the safe, just in
case the squint has his guard down as the door opens.