Gun Safe Inop

Stevyamda

Here’s a first.

After a range morning visit, I went to put away my firearms. I put in my code to my Sports Afield safe. As I turned the handle to unlock the lugs, I heard a snap and felt the handle give.
A half hour conversation with Sports Afield customer service yielded no immediate solution. I’m now waiting for “clutch” parts. Back ordered of course. Once I get those, Sports Afield will hire a locksmith to break into my safe and fix the mechanical lock.
Some takeaways I’d like to pass on:

A. Safes do fail
B. Register your safe with the manufacturer for ease when “A” happens
C. Lifetime warranties are good
D. The keys to my ammunition lockers are locked away safely (guess where). Best to divide keys into multiple safes in case “A” happens.

For me, this may take months to fix. 90% of my guns are fed by ammunition that I can’t access. And the other 10% of my guns are locked up in the broken safe. For the foreseeable future, I’m pretty much going to have to shoot what I had loaded for my morning range trip. It’s not the end of the world, just an inconvenience….

Dynlingan

Even mechanical dials can be defeated with relative ease. There are a few commercial autodialers that can discover the code, and at least one homebrew dialer made from consumer components.

Westman

Same thing happened with my keypad after a few years—it just stopped responding. I ended up bypassing it by opening the back panel and using a 9V battery jump-start trick. Since then, I’ve started looking into more reliable Gun Safes that offer basic manual overrides. Electronic locks seem convenient at first, but they don’t age well if the wiring or board goes bad.