Advice on Building a Wooden Gun Storage Locker

[DonNikmare]

Well I just ordered my 1st rifle and got in a little trouble with my loving wife for overspending a 'little'

I only have a small locker for handguns and understandably do not see the possibility for buying a safe or anything like it in the near future.

I've been thinking about building a small, inside the closet, wooden locker out of some spare plywood peices I have in the garage. It would provide a minimal level of storage security until recent memory of spending money on "wants" and not "needs" fades.

I forsee spending money only on some hinges and a good lock.

Any adice would be welcomed!

Nik

 

[rayra]

$80-100 will buy you a Homak 8-rifle steel cabinet.
"Do it for the children"

 

[Norton]

Don't go cheap when figuring out how to safely store your firearms, particularly if childeren are involved.

Like Rayra said, for around $100 you can have Homak locker. For around $400 you can get a "safe" with a dial lock, bolts in the doors, etc. I got mine at Bass Pro for $350 on sale and with our military discount....made by Granite or someone like that.

 

[Ryder]

Use a "piano hinge" with lots of screws and make sure it's mounted on the inside. This should run the length of your door. Several shelf supports can be employed internally (in the corners and such) to reinforce it from being pryed apart. Two locks would be better than one, place them near the corners. Use liquid nails, it's tough stuff. Use screws instead of nails and strip the heads or counter sink and fill over them. Carpet the inside with fake fur! I made one like this as a temporary solution until I could buy a safe back during my college days when I only had a couple firearms. It worked just fine.

You can decorate the door by cutting a silhouette image in card board, wetting it down, and lightly burning the wood with a torch. Something like an eagle or big 8 point deer.

Hope any of this is useful.

 

[RICOV]

locker?

wood and such materails are easy enough to work with, your focus should be on detection, any dwelling has pockets, filled or not. simple tools and a little imagination keeps the children safe as well as a clumsey offcial, and if said official isnt clumsey, theres materials that defeat hand held radar depth detecters. wood is,,, well, think about that when your staring at your eyelids tonight. ask freinds about the materails, no point in posting them. also, if you like the idea of having your safe in the open, consider obsolete candy\pop machines, i have three, and it took so long for theif to breach, i caught them! vendors, manufactuers and such have them laying around as junk to scrap! thick enough to weld to your specs, sealed tight against moisture, plumbed for electricity, what more could you want for a mere pittance?

 

[CZSteve]

Hey Nik,

What did ya get?
Where?
How much? (if you don't mind my asking)

Assuming it's for the April rifle get-together.

Hope to see ya there.

 

[Nando Aqui]

Nik,

Many years ago I was faced with a similar situation, but it had to do more with concealment than anything else, and I couldn't afford a safe either. So I built a 'hidden compartment' inside a closet.

At one end of the closet. I built a false wall leaving a space about 8 inches deep, IIRC. The door itself was 1/2" ply with drywall over it. I then used inside corner moulding to go over all the corners of the entire closet (not that many anyway), and this disguised the 'new wall' nicely.

I did not use hinges or anything like that - instead, I would just pull off the wall. The 'wall' fit snuggly, so it wouldn't just fall off, and to get it started on its way open, I drilled a Ø1/8" hole on the side closest to the front, and would use a small hook to pull the wall a little ways, and then just grabbed it and took it off.

We used to store light boxes, blankets and such against the false wall, and if you did not know it, you couldn't tell that there was anything there. Mind you, it was not a quick-access storage, but it worked nicely.

Alex

 

[Norton]

On the concealment issue....my safe is under the basement stairs....just enough room to squeeze it under the tread hanger.

As I start work on finishing that last part of the basement, I'm going to use an Ikea Billy Bookcase to conceal the opening. I figure a couple of heavy duty drawer sliders turned sideways and connected to a header and the back of the bookcase and I'm covered

 

[DonNikmare]

Steve, I got a CETME with SS receiver and wood furniture from AimSurplus.com for 359.00 including the hand pick fee. AIM is one of only two places I found to have the SS receiver ones. The other one is Guns n Stuff but I would not recommend them due to fact that their customer service sucked.

What got me in trouble with my wife was the extra $149 + $21 in shipping for a 1000 case of ammo.

Thanks to all for the feedback and ideas. Keep it coming, I'm still in the brainstorming stage.

Nik

 

[Apple a Day]

I built a wooden box for handguns a few years ago. The top and bottom are double-layered so that they are extra sturdy and the screws are unreachable. The first layer has screws in from the outside, the second layer has screws from the inside out, stop 1/4 inch short of going through.
For the hinges, use a Dremmel or router to countersink the hinges into the wood so they are flush and aren't accessible from the outside. Use heavy hinges.
For padding, look through the sewing section of Wal Mart. They have 'batting' or whatever they call it for quilts. It comes in different thicknesses and is inexpensive.
Good luck and post some pics when you finish, eh.

 

[oldfart]

Whatever you build, a determined thief will defeat it if he has enough time. You need to slow him down.

I lined the walls, ceiling and floor of a small closet with 3/4" plywood. I then laced a small wire back and forth across all the plywood and ran the ends of the wire out to where I could access them later. Finally, I put another layer of 3/4" plywood over the wires.

The main part of the door was made up of --- what else?-- 3/4" plywood with some more of that wire sandwiched between the layers. The hinge was some heavy-duty piano hinge set into the frame with long, long screws. The locks (there are two of them) are 5/16" Allen Head cap screws threaded into a piece of 1-1/2" X 1-1/2" angle iron that I fastened to the other side of the door frame with some more of those long screws. The cap screws are counter-sunk into the outer piece of plywood but kept from ripping out the inner layer by a 12"X12" piece of 10 guage steel that I put between the plywood layers. Each cap screw is covered with a heavy-duty hasp that is locked with a padlock. As I said, there are two of these locks and they have different keys.

The wires-- remember them?-- run under the carpet, through the wall into a different room where they are attached to an alarm system. If a thief does decide to break in, he'll break one of the wires and set off a very loud alarm. If he cuts the locks and unbolts the door the motion detector will sense that and the klaxton will go off, alerting me, the neighbors and half of this side of the city.

Total cost for materials? About $50. Of course, I had a lot of that stuff laying around as junk, so all I had to buy was the hinge, the locks, some wire and the horn. I painted the whole thing too, so that added to the cost.

The biggest problem was not the cost, it was the pain. My wife complained about the noise, the dust-- everything! But when we went on a trip and were able to lock her jewelry up securely, she suddenly saw the light. Now my gunsafe is one of the best ideas SHE ever came up with. Ah well, she's a good cook...

 

[Valkman]

Good stuff, oldfart! Them wives sure are smart! LOL