Vault Door Recommendations

[Hrbie22]

Hi all,

A little back story here. We are in the process of getting ready to build our new home. And since we are really only wanting to do this once, I am opting for a built in gun vault/safe room.

The room with be completely encased by concrete that will be poured with the foundation of the house(with the exception of a few sleeves for power, HVAC and a drain in the floor).

I'm currently looking for a good vault door. I have no experience buying vault doors so turned to THR for some recommendations. Looking at a standard door, 80x36, but want to have one pinned down before the house is started on to make sure my rough opening and door jive up.

Thanks in advance THR.

 

[hso]

Liberty and Fort Knox both have vault doors available. We used Liberty.

I would first plan on designing the vault and entry to avoid water entering around the door in the event of a pipe burst. That might only require the lip to be a few inches above the floor if the floor outside is drained or it may require a significant step over. Try to put the vault on the side of the house that has the walls have the least contact with the ground.

Always design with more space than you think you will need. You'll always fill a storage space up regardless of how big you make it, but you can't easily add more after you've built in with poured concrete. If nothing else you can treat it as a panic room.

If you plan on using it for a panic room consider having a door that swings in so debris won't block the door from swinging out.

Since you're spending $5,000 for a vault door, find out if delivery and installation are part of the price. Professional delivery and installation not only can result in a better result, but any damage or improper installation can be more easily resolved since you're only dealing with one company. Even better is that's part of the job to get it there, get in, get it in place.

Ask what standard is being used to rate the break in resistance. Do you want to meet UL or fed security standards? https://www.navfac.navy.mil/content/dam/navfac/Specialty Centers/Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center/DoD_Lock_Program/PDFs/AA-D-600.pdf

 

[CapnMac]

I'd not use one for room access, as they are seldom good 'human' dimensions.
There are frame considerations, too.

There are more typical "man doors" that are security rated, and will stand out less to prying eyes.

Now, to make a very secure closet within a secure room, ok, just remember that you need a sill and a header for that vault door. That is unless you start looking into actual bank vault doors. Which are available, as most branch banks now use precast concrete for vaults (and some branch banks only have safe deposit boxes, rather than cash repositories).

 

[George P]

Here's another option:
https://www.smithsecuritysafes.com/vault-doors

 

[Hrbie22]

Let me go into a little more detail about the space. It will be accessed from the basement, the walls will be poured when the foundation is poured, and it will end up being capped by the garage floor when it is poured. Also, i say safe room, but more a storm shelter. And the in-swing door was already on my radar, just in case a storm rolled in and everything dropped around the room.

 

[ericuda]

http://www.tornadosafe.com/tornado-shelters/above-ground-garage-unit/

I would give folks like this a call. They make shelters but they know how to attach a door to concrete walls.

 

[CapnMac]

And the in-swing door was already on my radar, just in case a storm rolled in and everything dropped around the room.

In-swing "safe" door is leaning towards hen's teeth and unobtanium.

You can get a surprising amount of security out of a hollow metal (steel) frame door an frame (you will want a threshold, too).

Since a garage floor is roofing this room, you might want to allow for about 3" of rigid foam insulation to help regulate the shelter/safe room.

 

[George P]

In-swing "safe" door is leaning towards hen's teeth and unobtanium.

You can get a surprising amount of security out of a hollow metal (steel) frame door an frame (you will want a threshold, too).

Since a garage floor is roofing this room, you might want to allow for about 3" of rigid foam insulation to help regulate the shelter/safe room.

At the link I posted you can get either in-swing or out-swing

 

[BillWM]

The vault door you pick depends on the level of security you need. Regular gun type safe doors are easily defeated with a saws all. If you want something that will resist attack for a decent period of time you need a commercial door. These will have much more hard plate, relockers and even electronic relockers.
Try places that carry used commercial safes, they are far superior to your Browning, Liberty etc. doors made of bent gauge size mild steel.
A good alarm is your best friend since it is the amount of time required to forcefully enter your gun vault. You may slow some down but experienced thieves know how to get inside.

 

[Chuck R.]

I went through the same thing hen we built our house.

We setup a safe room under the 3 car garage. A "safe room" also has it's own requirements when it came to a door that a lot of vault doors won't have:

Inswing, so you're not trapped by debris.
Panic lock, so you can secure from the inside.

We went with a fire proof vault door from Sturdy safe Co:

https://www.sturdysafe.com/products/vault-door

By the time I was done with "extras" it was a little over $4K. Between it and the alarm system we're pretty well protected.

 

[GE-Mini-Gun]

Devil’s advocate...door is nothing if they know it's there and the rest of the room isn't hardened. Yeah you have a nice door, but only 8" concrete wall with no rebar and the top is only 4" thick with 8 or 10ga. corrugated steel plate; what’s all this mean...if you don’t hardened all of it they’ll get in. Not the same thing, but I got into 3 LARGE safes for a guy two years ago with a cordless drill and reciprocating saw…took about 15 minutes for each, the longest part was drilling the hole for the blade…going in from the top would be a cake walk.

 

[Chuck R.]

Devil’s advocate...door is nothing if they know it's there and the rest of the room isn't hardened. Yeah you have a nice door, but only 8" concrete wall with no rebar and the top is only 4" thick with 8 or 10ga. corrugated steel plate; what’s all this mean...if you don’t hardened all of it they’ll get in. Not the same thing, but I got into 3 LARGE safes for a guy two years ago with a cordless drill and reciprocating saw…took about 15 minutes for each, the longest part was drilling the hole for the blade…going in from the top would be a cake walk.

Agreed, but any effective "defense" is done in layers. The hardened stuff simply buys time and also deters the "opportunity" crooks. The determined guys are going to get in. Question is will they get in and out, before the LE response generated by the alarm system, and how many decent pictures the cameras took during the process.

In my case, they violate the perimeter alarm system, run into our dogs, then get caught by the motion system in the vault. When they do get into the safe room they find the expensive stuff in an additional safe.

All of which buys time. The other option of course is to say "it's too hard to protect my chit" and do nothing. Like we say at work:

"Perfection is the enemy of good enough".

 

[GE-Mini-Gun]

100% correct, but very few think like that.

 

[Trent]

Getting an in-swing "vault" door is going to be.. difficult. Changes the entire dynamics of how to protect things.

Probably too late to mess with blueprints, but if I were doing a new build I would do a 2 room build. First room has a heavy duty security door (inswing). I bought one for my lab at the office, steel frame (welded in place), very very robust on it's own. The steel door has features in it which make it cut and torch resistant. Cost about $2200 to install. It's not a vault on it's own - just a normal door (made of not so normal materials).

Would withstand a battering ram for quite a while, you'd have to cut through it, although that would be troublesome as well.

Inside the lab is the vault - an original bank vault, a Mosler Magna series.



Those are also unobtanium since the company (Mosler) isn't around anymore.



Size 11 shoes for scale reference. This vault has 11.5" of well-hardened reinforced concrete poured on all 6 sides.

Anyway the point of a 2 room build is you can use an off-the-shelf swing OUT vault door (which are abundantly available) and a swing IN entry door.

The outer room is used for stuff that is not as secure but still worth securing, and the steel entry door will resist just about anything you can reasonably throw at it in a short period of time; saw, torch, etc. (Good security doors feature interior fireproofing materials (e.g. mineral wool) to make them difficult to torch cut, as well as other features such as rolling bars inside, which make them resistant to sawzalls, etc).

The other advantage of this is you have created a completely separate fire proofing arrangement by which the inner room (vault door protected) is behind another room (with a fire resistant door on it's own) - so the vault proper is even better protected from fire damage, being doubly insulated.

This also allows you to give keys/entry to family household members to get in to the outer room while still protecting the vault (with guns and other valuables). SO even the kids can get in to the "outer" room via the security door (tornado, intruder, whatever), but they can't get in to the inner vault with the guns.

 

[Trent]

Also look in to Graffunder for an option on vault doors.

I have a Graffunder vault at home and the materials and worksmanship is top notch.

Be advised they are costly. Graffunder is at the top of the food chain when it comes to quality and worksmanship.

https://www.graffundersafes.com/

 

[BillWM]

You get what you pay for, barely! Security should equal the threat level, if it's just spur of the moment break ins then unlikely they will be able to defeat an alarm and a sturdy safe. What safes/vaults do is slow the thieves down, the more steel you put in the way the longer it takes to defeat. A class1 combination lock requires a dialer to open that can takes days to accomplish. Forcible entry is the usual method thieves choose. Hardened steel stops saw and drill attacks, torches are another consideration. It is a good alarm that will not give them the time to break in and thieves will leave (the smart ones) before authorities arrive.

 

[Jim Watson]

Hardened steel stops saw and drill attacks, torches are another consideration.

I once pointed out to a friend that he should lock up his diamond saw and cutting torch tips along with his valuables.

 

[BillWM]

Jim I agree, and don't have any live power outlets nearby. Never show anyone your security, it's usually an acquaintance of a friend that is shady or knows someone who is and talk of a "cool vault" travels. Social media does not help either, if you put your life online they know when you're away. Don't brag about a holiday until you return.