I picked a Smith Security Magnum Extreme because I liked the look of stainless, and you can get it stainless clad as an option ($1155 option on an unpainted door, or $800 extra on a painted door). They also make Gun Safes. Also, it has a one inch thick front plate, so that is nice. By the time I added paint, stainless, an inside handle, a full inside flange, some required "easy install" thing, a thermal re-locker, and a manganese hard plate, My final price, after correction for missing items, was $4839 delivered. The owner, Doug Smith, was always available and easy to work with during the ordering process.
http://www.smithsecuritysafes.com/pages ... Price.html
I opted for a regular dial lock this time, to keep more of a classic look fitting for the wine cellar. I have no reason to be able to get in there quickly.
In preparation for the door's arrival, I hired a friend to make a thick concrete wall with rebar. Pump truck access was sketchy, so he shoveled in the mix, and we used about 70 bags of 5000psi concrete.
The wall came out well. He later covered it with drywall and paint.
When the door was ready, I asked for photos to see if I could catch anything before it was shipped. They didn't send any, and shipped the door.
The door arrived close to the estimated time, and at 1500 lbs it was quite a task to even get it off the freight truck. When I inspected it, there were three immediate problems and so I contacted the maker.
The first was that I had ordered it with a lifting-ring so that it could be hoisted into place, and the ring was missing. Doug said that was his shop-manager's fault, and I should call him to make it right. I opted to buy one on my own, and pay for overnight shipping, so that I would not miss the install schedule. Fine, it worked out.
Another was that it was missing the full inside flange that I opted for because I knew it would cost me more to hire someone to construct one from wood. Doug apologized and said he forgot to put in the work order for that, and offered to send me one later. Even though I knew that I had to eat the additional cost of custom wood-work, I declined, as I had a completion date that I wanted to stick to.
The big problem was that some of the bolts were crooked. I was concerned because I knew that once the door was installed, it was installed. Doug said that was normal, and they tend to straighten out when the door is in place. I decided to proceed with the install.
Seven of my friends helped with the install, and we got it moved and bolted into place in three hours. The move was a challenge because the truck could not being it to the final location. I could easily see professionals charging $2000 or more to install or remove this, but I got it done for under $1000 although I owe a lot of favors now.
I had put a threaded rod on the concrete, and we used that with a come-a-long as a fail-safe. The guys can actually hold the door with their own strength, and the steel cable is just the safety to the guys who could have done it without the cable once the door got started part-way up by the winch.
As you can see, the bolt did not straighten out when the door was in place.
And it is obvious why - the guide tube that holds the bolt was welded in crooked. I send these photos to Doug, and he was dismissive. He said that the plungers were supposed to be at an angle because they work better than when straight.
I could see that if they were all at the same angle, but they were pointing in all different directions, which is clearly just poor craftsmanship.
I carefully measured all of the bolt angles, and this is what I came up with:
-0.5, 2.5, 1.1, 0.8, 2.2, -1.5, 4.0, and 0.5 degrees.
Normal manufacturing tolerances are +- 0.5 degrees, and honestly, even if they were +- 1.0 degree - heck even +- 2.0 degrees, I would not have complained.
But one bolt going 1.5 degrees inward right above another one that is going 4.0 degrees outward is a 5.5 degree spread, which is terrible. My thought was that if I bought a $399 Chinese-made gun safe, and the work was this sloppy, even that would be returned. Really at any price point there are reasonable standards that someone should maintain just to be in business as a professional fabricator.
And I can see how that happened. The guy who drilled the holes in the frame made one 1/8 inch farther from the door-stop than the bolt next to it. Normal tolerances are +- 0.005 inches, so this was about 25 times out of spec. Again, if this were, say, +- 0.020, I would not have mentioned it - but an eighth of an inch off is too much for this kind of thing. The next guy had to cock the bolts at angles to make them go into the frame holes.
I sent these findings to Doug, and he said that all of his doors are done by hand, and never the same. I can understand custom work and how one door is different from the next, but the bolts on one door should all be pointed in the same direction as the other bolts.
I then also noticed that he accidentally overcharged me by $415, but after a lot of back and forth emails and me making it more and more clear of the mistake, he finally agreed, apologized, and send me a check for that difference.
We went back and forth many times on the bolt issue, and I asked if he could hire someone to repair it in place, because I was concerned about my slate floor getting cracked and being without a door, and he declined. He offered to have a truck pick it up if I got my friends to uninstall it and track their hours, but he didn't mention how I would get a replacement re-installed - so I knew it would cost me money an friends. I couldn't ask my friends relive that two more times, even for pay.
Since I knew that removing the door, shipping it, repairing it, shipping it back, and re-istalling it would cost him about $3000, I thought about if he could just compensate me for this so that I could hire someone to fix it on my own, or live with it.
In coming up with a discount for this kind of blemish, I thought about how much of a discount I would want if he had sent me those photos that I asked for in advance, and discovered the problem then. Or even if it was not caught then, if when I first asked about the crooked bolts when the door had not yet been unpacked and installed - and he hadn't advised me to install it anyway, how much off I would want to accept to keep it.
A 25% discount on a $5000 door is $1250, so that seemed fair - not to mention it would be less than 1/2 the cost to him of handling a full replacement - so it would help him out also. Even so, I decided to ask for $1000. He declined, and said that there were guys who happily accepted $200 from him in the past for scratches on stainless.
I countered with $800 because I could hire someone to fix it, and possibly get it done for that amount with some risk and effort. I told him I would assume all risk, or he could arrange for paying someone to fix it in-place, and he could assume the risk.
I spoke to a welder and he said that he can cut out the three worst guide tubes, weld in new ones, enlarge the bolt holes, weld in steel to remake the holes round, sand down the welds, fill in any surface defects with Bondo, and then mask off the room in plastic, and paint over the repaired areas with matching paint. I asked about the welding damaging the stainless or the other paint, and he said he can mitigate that with dry ice.
I presented that $800 figure to Doug, and he declined, and offered $300, or said he will send guys to pick up the door and give me a full refund.
The offer of a refund, while theoretically nice, is impractical because of all of the labor involved at this point. I would have to hire people to install the next one, so that alone would actually cost me $1000 to $2000, not to mention not having a door for another 14 weeks.
Any thoughts on what to do? Maybe just take the $300, live with knowing that I can't repair it for that (even a plumber charges more than that for something easy and routine), and be more careful to use a company like Brown Safe, American Security / Amsec, Fort Knox, Browning, Sturdy, National Security, Liberty Safe, or Graffunder next time?
