Tag: gun safes

Customize Your Fort Knox Gun Safe

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Most brands of gun safes are mass produced with little or no flexibility in colors or options. Fort Knox gun safes (excluding the Maverick series) can be customized to create your own one-of-kind safe that truly reflects your needs and taste. Here are some of the options Fort Knox gives you:

  • Nine sizes of gun safes
  • Internal or external hinges, on the left or right
  • Three textured paint colors and thirteen high gloss paint colors
  • Two tone paint schemes or custom blended colors
  • Eight interior configurations, with five fabric selections
  • Door organizers or Velcro compatible inside door panels
  • Two interior light packages
  • Multiple different graphics packages
  • Up-graded fire protection
  • Add extra steel to the safe body and/or the door – you decide how much
  • Add stainless steel or Armaknox Ballistic AR500 steel
  • Add corner bolts to units that don’t normally have them
  • Pull handles to make opening a heavy safe door easier
  • Locks: Group 2, Group 1, electronic or redundant
  • All kinds of accessories and extras: Mirror inside back wall; jewelry drawers; pistol pockets & storage bags; carpeted pedestals; humidity control, etc.

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The safe shown is a Fort Knox Guardian 6031 in Champaign color, with black chrome hardware & trim, and beige interior. Options include external hinges, pull handle, raised double diamond graphics, electronic lock, internal lights and an inner steel lining of 10 gauge steel. Standard features include the 5 spoke handle, corner bolts, door organizer, internal electric plug, etc.

Everyone’s needs and preferences are different: You store gold, your friend stores silver; you have 47 valuable rare rifles, your friend has 5 low end shotguns; you like black, he likes green; your safe will be a showpiece where everyone sees it, his will be hidden in the furnace room; you keep lots of cash at home, he doesn’t. You need more protection than your friend and you want to project your personality. Don’t buy the same (inferior) gun safe that everyone else buys at the local box store. Work with your Fort Knox dealer to design something special – something with real protection and style.

Gun Safes Make Great Christmas Gifts, But . . .

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Gun safes make terrific Christmas gifts provided that the unit selected is appropriate for the recipient’s needs. That can be a problem, however, because the well-intended purchaser often does not appreciate the differences in quality, and they may not know about everything the user will store in the safe. The buyer is usually a girl friend or wife who is buying an expensive gift for her man. Understandably, she is focused on price because even a cheap gun safe is a big purchase.

Big box stores take full advantage of this situation with Black Friday sales and Christmas sales. They sell thousands of cheap Chinese units which, to the person who doesn’t do proper research, appear to be suitable. The result can be that the gun owner ends up with a safe he would not buy for himself. It might not offer the protection he knows he should have. While truly appreciating the thought behind his present, he may have unspoken doubts about using it. It’s a difficult gift to return. We have all been there with one gift or another.

So here are my suggestions:

  • Don’t buy a gun safe as a surprise. Talk about it in advance. Get his input about brand, size, and value of what he will use it for.
  • Be wary of Black Friday and Christmas sales.
  • Don’t buy only, or primarily, based on price.
  • Don’t buy a Chinese product.
  • Both parties should learn the basics about gun safes, the differences in brands and models. A good place to start is by reading my earlier posts about gun safes, safe locks, etc.
  • Buy from a legitimate safe store, not a gun store or big box. Your research time will be well spent talking directly with safe experts who actually service different brands.
  • If cost of a good unit is too high, then agree that this gift will be for Christmas and his birthday, or this Christmas and next, or have him pitch in on the cost, or get his family to contribute.

Honestly, a quality gun safe is a gift he will actually use and remember for years, even if he has to help with the cost. But the memory will be less positive if it is one of those gifts that he would secretly prefer to return for something better.

Buy Your Gun Safe from a Local Dealer, Not Online

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Someone asked about “Reason #4” in the last post, “Internet sellers usually do not know as much about gun safes and vault doors as a good local dealer . . .” Here is why that is true.

Internet sellers offer no service. They show a picture of a safe, a brief description, the price, “click here to add to cart”, and it gets dropped off outside your home. They may have inventory or it may be drop shipped from the factory.  But they don’t learn the products intimately.

A good safe company/dealer will work with the gun safes and vaults on a whole different level. Local safe companies are the people who see the safes after a fire or burglary attempt — the internet sellers don’t. Local dealers see which units survive or fail in a fire. We know which locks are prone to failure because our technicians are the ones that open safes when locks quit working. We know which safes are easy to drill or pry open, which ones have effective relockers, which ones have effective “hardplate”, which ones have drywall insulation that is pieced together from construction scraps, etc. Local safe businesses are the people who go out to perform warranty work, not the online seller.

Occasionally, we hear people’s anger when they discover that the safe they bought online was misrepresented. Pictures on a website may look good, but poor quality is more apparent when the safe shows up in your driveway. Disappointment is especially common with vault doors purchased online. A local business is likely to be more truthful because they have a hometown reputation to protect.

The product knowledge issue also applies to gun stores that sell gun safes as a sideline. If they do not have real safe technicians with the ability to service safes, they just do not have the same knowledge that a safe company has.

Buy your safe locally from a full service safe and vault business!

Top 10 Reasons Not To Buy a Gun Safe Over the Internet

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Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Not Buy a Gun Safe Over the Internet

“Top 10” lists are very popular since David Letterman used them every day on his show. Here is mine:

#10 Internet sellers do not support your local economy. You should support your local main street type businesses.

#9 Internet sellers usually do not arrange to have the gun safe installed in your home.

#8 Internet sellers certainly will not come to your home to service your safe.

#7 When purchasing a safe over the internet you cannot see it and “kick the tires” before you buy it.

#6 Most internet sellers specialize in selling cheap, inferior, Chinese made (junk) safes. This often leads to #5.

#5 Internet sellers frequently misrepresent what they are selling.

#4 Internet sellers usually do not know as much about gun safes and vault doors as a good local dealer, and the local dealer can show you side-by-side comparisons between different units.

#3 Internet sellers are disgusting, good-for-nothing, miserable excuses for human beings, whose mothers abandoned them at an early age down by the railroad tracks. Haha.

#2 Things can get messy, and buyers tend to get angry, when they find problems with their new safe after it is unpackaged and the delivery truck has already left.

#1 How do you know that the delivery driver, or someone else in the freight system, has not removed the box from your safe long enough to write down the combination? And the address to your home is on the outside of the box!

I probably exaggerated on #3, but the other points are real concerns – these things really happen!

Fire & Fire/Burglary Safes VS. Gun Safes: Big Differences

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The vast majority of fire or fire/burglary safes, are built with an outer steel shell and an inner steel shell. The space between the steel layers is filled with a poured-in composite material similar to concrete. (Note that box stores frequently sell safes with plastic inner linings, and even plastic on the outside — don’t waste your money.) Photo on left shows a high quality Gardall fire safe, with steel interior and poured in composite insulation.

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Almost all gun safes consist of an outer steel shell lined on the inside with drywall, and no inner steel. Most use Type X drywall which contracts and breaks into pieces during a fire. Drywall is a poor insulator compared to the poured-in composite. That causes manufacturers to misrepresent their fire ratings. Photo on right is a typical gun safe – fabric covered drywall, no inner steel.

Most quality fire safes have an Underwriters Laboratories fire rating of one or two hours. These safes have been tested independently under standard procedures at temperatures up to 1700 and 1800 degrees, respectively. Some have also undergone a 30 foot drop test. Imported units are normally tested according to Korean or Japanese standards, which are similar to U.L.’s. Gun safes will rarely pass U.L. tests so most manufacturers and importers do their own tests, or they make up numbers without testing. They often mislead consumers by mentioning “U.L. Rated”, but the U.L. rating they refer to has nothing to do with fire.

There are all kinds of ways to cheat when you test your own product. I have been told by people who worked there, that one company actually caulks the door shut during their fire test. Another way to fudge is to put the inside temp recorders in the bottom of the test unit where temps are lowest. Putting some kind of thermal barrier in front of the safe during the test also works well. For instance, remember how effectively even a sheet of paper blocks radiant heat coming off a camp fire.

If you want to protect papers or cash in a safe with the very best fire ratings available, you really should not get a gun safe. If a gun safe with inner steel and poured-in composite makes sense to you, look at Graffunder safes or Amsec’s BF series.