Authority Safes contacted me about reviewing one of the gun safes they sell. They wanted to give me a SentrySafe Quick Access Pistol Safe for review. Before I accepted it I told them that if I found something I didn’t like that I wouldn’t hold back in reporting that. They told me they wouldn’t want it any other way. That was a good start. I accepted the safe and played with it quite a bit.

I didn’t follow through with this post as quickly as I should have. I have had the safe since sometime in early February. It has been sitting beside my bed making me feel guilty every time I step over it to get into bed. So today I finally got around to doing the last of the tests I wanted to do and now I’m reporting everything.

First is the worst thing I have to say about the safe. As reported in this video review if you press the buttons too fast it won’t open. You have to try again. And “too fast” isn’t all that fast. I didn’t even have to try to have it fail. I have to deliberately slow down from what feels like a natural speed to me. But I may not be normal in this regard. Since I was in grade school people have commented on how quick I am with my fingers and hands.

The second worst thing I have to say about the safe is about one of its features. That’s right, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! After not opening the safe for several weeks I tried to open it and it failed even when I did it slow. What? I know that is the combination. Oh! Now I remember. The first button push is just to get its attention and doesn’t count toward the actual combination. It turns on the backlight for the buttons and gives you low level illumination for entering the combination. I understand why they did this. It’s kind of a cool feature but it delayed my entry into the safe by several seconds. If I had just woken up and was in a high stress situation my brain might not have solved the puzzle nearly as quickly as I did this time. I would recommend opening it at least once a week just to keep your fingers and brain up to speed on the proper combination and speed of button pushes.

The third worst thing I have to say about it is that I am a little bit concerned about the back up lock. There have been reports of this type of lock being defeated with the barrel of a Bic pen. I tried some things but couldn’t find a plastic tube of the proper diameter. This concern is going to depend on who you are trying to keep the contents away from. If your threat model is small children then this safe is going to be great. If the threat model is a criminal with tools then the safe is probably susceptible, even if you utilize the supplied lag screws, to crow bar removal from your premises and a metal saw. If the threat model is a smart teenager with lots of time who wants surreptitious access then maybe you need to investigate further.

Now the good things I have to say.

It’s small enough it will slide under the bed and fit in a lot of drawers. It’s large enough I can get everything I can reasonably expect to need, short of body armor, that I might need in a quick access pistol safe.

The safe feels solid. I didn’t even have a temptation to try and pry or force things to gain access. I used to have a gun cabinet that just looking at it gave me the urge to apply a drill and a hacksaw blade to it. This safe did not tempt me in a similar manner.

I trust this safe to keep my grandkids and casual criminals out of it while giving me ready access.

Here are my pictures and further comments:

It’s a nice looking safe. There are no easy pry points. The dark smudges are from me handling it with oily fingers. The surface cleans up easily and I would not expect corrosion even if I were to put it in a moderately abusive environment.

Above you see that I was able to put my loaded, cocked, and locked STI Eagle 5.1 with a 18 round magazine in the safe with room for two more 18 round magazines, in their holsters, a Surefire flashlight, and hearing protection.

In another configuration I removed one magazine and substituted ESS eye protection. I didn’t realize it until after I took the pictures but I can also rearrange things and put the magazine in it’s holster in the position where the eye protection is and move the eye protection to the magazine position in the above picture. It all fits.

I think it’s a good safe for most home applications and recommend people give it serious consideration.

See also reviews by Say Uncle, Robb Allen, and their commenters. I didn’t watch the YouTube video linked to by one but I scanned it without seeing this particular safe.

This is the gun (with part of the serial number obscured) I have been shooting:

Custom guns just for us knuckle dragging gun bloggers! How cool is that?

I had some problems yesterday and finally figured out what was going on (with a simpler repro of the problem by JR). If the gun cycles, you let up on the trigger to the first click, squeeze (it will hit a hard stop without firing), then let up until the next click, then pull the gun will lock up. You have to manually cycle the slide (roughly the equivalent to a computer reboot) to recover. I mentioned this to Kerby, the Para USA guy, and he said, “Yes. It will do that. Don’t do that. After the gun cycles move you finger until the nail touches the front of the trigger guard then do your pull.” He went on to explain that this is because I’ve been shooting single action guns for a long time. Others that shoot double action or Glock type actions before using a Light Double Action (which this is) don’t have this problem.

At Microsoft we call a bug that is easily reached and causes the program to crash a Priority 0 bug. Priority 0 bugs must be fixed before the product is shipped. Telling the customer, “Don’t do that” isn’t really an option for a released product.

Yesterday I had many failures to feed as well. After oiling the gun this morning those problems went away until very late in the day when the gun got dirty again. And after adapting my shooting technique to avoid the system lock up (and the required reboot) I did pretty well. On the last big “stage” at the end of the day with shooting on the move, shooting movers, and plates racks I had the best run of anyone (possibly even Todd who fumbled some reloads and had other problems) until Caleb shot the stage with a borrowed gun that had 18 round magazines. The rest of us used eight round magazines and I required five magazines to complete the stage.

At the end of the day several of us, including me, were able to hit the eight (?) inch plates at 35 yards half the time or better.

I have to conclude the gun works well as long as you don’t run into that one bug.

Draw your own conclusions as to whether the gun (your version would look like this) is for you.