Safe

Our cotswold like quite a few AS has a safe fitted under one of the seats, I,m pretty sure if the wrong person found it, they with some work could remove the safe.
Has anyone thought about or has fitted something else that you deem either really safe or hidden in such a way no one is going to find it. My thoughts are with having one safe like ours which would be easy to find they would not look for the second or main one.

Over to you

I understand what you're saying - the fact that it's obviously a safe makes it a target.

I've taken the opposite approach on the current van - the space I use is not really at all hard to break into, but it's not where you would expect to find a storage area.

Obviously the effort you go to on this needs to be determined by the value of what you put in it. I only keep around £100 in cash, a £200 handheld GPS receiver and my driving licence, passport and credit cards. None of that is really a big deal, so I can't justify anything sophisticated.

Incidentally there has been some quite good lateral thinking on secure storage - for example the "worn underpants with skid mark" (including realistic aroma, apparently), though I confess I have never actually tried one of those!

-mojo- wrote:I understand what you're saying - the fact that it's obviously a safe makes it a target.

I I only keep around £100 in cash, a £200 handheld GPS receiver and my driving licence, passport and credit cards. None of that is really a big deal, so I can't justify anything sophisticated.

Thats more or less what I want to protect plus spare keys, some jewellery of the missus, my watch. The hassle factor of getting all that replaced plus the agro that would cause on a holiday just makes any work worth while

Hi there,

The previous owner of "Petal" had attached a strip of velcro to the top of the safe and his wife's jewellery was stuck up there in a slim leather wallet. It worked so well that we had owned "Petal" for two months and used the safe a few times before I reached in and knocked it off! ("Yes!" I did return it; and they sent me a lovely card and a £5 note to cover my costs. Nice people!)

Apart from that, I've always thought that a "disguised" safe would be a neat idea. Something like (but not) this:

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The reasons "not" are:

1) I fail to see why someone can't just open a bean tin at the "wrong" end, eat the beans, wash the tin out and then re-fit the bottom with a bit of double sided sticky tape rather than spend £5.27 + postage!

2) A lot of thieves are hungry so I personally wouldn't use a food container!

I think something like a false switchboard or radio speaker (i.e. something that is fixed to the van and has little or no value if it is removed) would be ideal; especially if it was in full view!

Needless to say, once someone is making them and selling them they become useless! In the case of the bean tin above it would take a thief a lot less time to go through our cupboards and shake all the cans than attack and open the safe!

Hey ho! Maybe the answer is not to leave anything of serious value in the van!

Best regards,

Ian

Dutto wrote:

Hey ho! Maybe the answer is not to leave anything of serious value in the van!

The problem is that sometimes there is no option but to leave stuff in the van ie say you were going down to the beach for the morning and to go swimming, Even out on the bikes i,m not sure i would want to carry everything with us encase we dropped something, left a bag behind by accident or just simply got robbed.
The more I think about it the answer has to be a false panel somewhere rather than a container

Having welded-up some weird shaped safes over the years (three for our last 'Yank'), the old saying goes ...."where there's a Will there's a way !!" (or a Relative )

Happy fabricating Folks

Brian

We have a safe which I fitted in our Pollensa. But we also use the "never put all your eggs in one basket" principle and so have several other 'secret' places to distribute any valuables. Can be a problem sometimes as the memory gets worse

Having once fought off an attempted street robbery in Cape Town, we also never keep all cards, money etc in one pocket, wallet, bag or whatever but distribute about our persons. And other than in the depths of the countryside, any rucksack or knapsack is worn on the front not the back!


Going one further than the skidmarked underpants trick,
how about a ziplock bag in the holding tank of the Thetford?

rogerblack wrote:..............

how about a ziplock bag in the holding tank of the Thetford?

Yeah, brilliant! And I would get robbed by one of those nervous ones that just has to "go"!!


Ian

Hi Robbie.

Know exactly what you mean. Apart from the safe under the pasenger seat in my van I also have a secret hiding place. I think the owner before me also used this place. I had owned the van 18 months before I discovered it.

As the saying goes " Hidden in plain sight "

Whisky.

Incidentally, here's a link to the underwear safe (just to show that I didn't make that one up!):

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-mojo- wrote:Incidentally, here's a link to the underwear safe (just to show that I didn't make that one up!):

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Brings a new slant on "Taken to the cleaners"

Brian

-mojo- wrote:Incidentally, here's a link to the underwear safe (just to show that I didn't make that one up!):

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Hi there,

Nearly $30 a throw?

I wouldn't pay that for a pair of knickers that genuinely belonged to Julia Roberts! (I dare post this 'cos Helen already knows that if Julia ever asked me I would suspend my vows long enough to commit suicide!)

I live in hope!


Ian