brought to you by: Dave Williams
This page: www.bacomatic.org/~dw/safe/safe.htm
Main page: http://www.bacomatic.org/~dw/index.htm
Last Updated: 16 Jul 2003
Author: Dave Williams; dlwilliams=aristotle=net
My buddy Felix had been collecting a lot of pistols lately. He kept them scattered in his home office. I griped at him every time I went over - his neighborhood, like mine, is now a "high crime area", and his office is, er, not really a secure place.
Felix kept looking at large, expensive gun safes, but the cost kept deterring him and the pistols just laid around in drawers and shooting bags. I kept telling him he didn't need a fancy gun safe, that almost anything would do as long as it put them out of sight and out of reach of a casual thief; if a pro wanted his toys, that Smith & Wesson safe he kept looking at wasn't going to help a whole lot.
Finally, one day when I was over I dumped a bunch of stuff from one of his filing cabinets, loaded it in my truck, and took it home. Over the course of a few weeks of round tuits I turned the filing cabinet into a nice little gun safe.
The two-drawer cabinet is by Steelcase and is very solid. It was about $15 at
a flea market.
For some reason the pictures don't show much about how it goes together. After welding I painted the new pieces gloss black. The angle iron welded to the top edge of the cabinet has several tabs sticking out. The tabs have holes drilled in them for the locking bar, which you can see laying on top. The locking bar is a piece of 5/16" cold rolled steel with a perforated tab welded to one end.
Down at the bottom is another piece of angle welded just below the bottom
drawer, with three large holes drilled in it.
The pegs on the bottom of the grate fit through the holes in the lower piece
of angle iron, then the grate leans back against the top of the cabinet.
There are several tabs under the top of the grate with holes lining up with
those on the tabs on the cabinet. The locking bar slides through all the
holes.
The grate is 1x1 and 1x2 steel tubing, a mix of 16a and 11ga I had left over
from other projects.
Here's the finished safe waiting to be cleaned; wiping with a rag soaked in
acetone got almost all the decades of crud off. We debated welding some steel
around the padlock holes to make it hard to get bolt cutters to it; Felix
decided to go to a hardened shackle lock instead.
Ideally we should have repainted the cabinet and grate all the same color;
office beige or tan for stealth, but Felix thought the black primer was fine.
I dropped the cabinet off at Felix's. It took him two days to get around to making a place for it and putting all his pistols in there. A couple of days after that he got broken in to - he lost some computer equipment (all obsolete junk) and they tossed the place pretty good. There were some screwdriver marks on the grate, but they didn't get into the cabinet. Probably kids. Anyway, it did its job, which is what counted.
Like I kept telling Felix, you don't have to make it impenetrable, you just have to make breaking in more trouble than it's worth.
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