Fort Knox Safe and Vault Builder

At Fort Knox, all of our safes and vault doors are custom-made and tailored to your specifications. We believe protecting your guns and valuables is personal, so we make it easy to forge a custom solution that delivers precisely the size, security, and fire protection that you need.

We have a full line of American made models to choose from as your starting place. You can view each of our premium safes and vault doors here, or download this PDF to see them all at a glance.

After selecting a model, how you customize your Fort Knox is entirely up to you. Configure the interior to house a large firearm collection or opt for a cabinet to house your watches, jewelry, or personal memories. Keep it simple with our standard steel thickness and fire protection that doubles our competitors’ average entry-level safe, or add additional layers of steel, ArmaKnox, and fire board to suit the value of your collection.

Security should be your first priority but don’t forget to make it your own. We offer more options than any other manufacturer, and we’re not afraid to tackle a custom request if you’re looking for something truly unique.

Ready to forge your custom Fort Knox? Let’s get started.

What to Expect

Already familiar with Fort Knox and know what you’re looking for? Feel free to skip straight to the vault builder by selecting “I know what I want”. Otherwise, click “Help Me Decide” and we’ll ask a few questions to help us make some initial recommendations. Don’t worry, nothing intrusive or personal – just enough to point you toward the best model, size, and configuration that suits your collection.

Once you’re in the vault builder, you can customize every aspect of your Fort Knox safe or vault door. You can also change the size and model at any point to upgrade or downgrade your starting point.

After you’ve built your Fort Knox, we’ll help you locate a local Fort Knox-certified dealer to provide the final cost, arrange delivery and installation, and ultimately place your order.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact your local dealer or call us directly at 866-545-2938.

Resources

• 2024 Product Catalog
• Comparison Table

What’s the difference?

Wondering what the difference is between a gun safe, home safe, and vault door? Each of these can protect your valuables, but they accomplish the task in a different way.

Home Safes

Our home safes feature interior organization systems (a set of drawers) suited for smaller items like watches, jewelry, handbags, collectibles, and other valuables. They are typically slimmer and shorter than gun safes so they can easily fit in your master bedroom or closet, though we can build them to be full-size.

Home safes feature thicker steel and greater fire protection than entry-level gun safes. They can be customized with different lock options to meet your needs and come standard with a beautiful, handcrafted cabinet inside.

Gun Safes

Gun safes are typically larger than home safes because they need to hold a collection of handguns and long guns. Handguns are stored on the back of the door, while long guns are stored vertically in a quarter-, half-, ¾, or full-rack layout. We generally recommend reserving half the space in your gun safe for long guns (with room to grow your collection) so the remaining space can be used for valuables, collectibles, and important documents.

All that said, you don’t need guns to get a gun safe. If you’re looking for a home safe but need a larger size than home safes offer, any Fort Knox gun safe can be upgraded to provide the same organization and protection as our home safes.

Fort Knox gun safes come in various sizes and configurations, offering top-of-the-line protection against theft, unauthorized access, and fire damage. We can customize your safe with various lock mechanisms and design it to fit your space perfectly. Whether you’re storing long guns, want a drawer system like our Home Safes, or prefer an all-shelves layout, we can tailor any safe to your needs.

Vault Doors

When you need to protect more space than a safe can provide, it’s time to upgrade to a vault door. Fort Knox vault doors offer all of the security of our safes without interior size restrictions, allowing you to protect any space in your house.

Vault doors are often used for shelter-in-place rooms, panic rooms, large gun collections, and bunkers, though we’ve also built custom vaults for cigar rooms, wine cellars, closets, and man caves.

Depending on your needs, we offer in-swing and out-swing vault doors that you can display in plain sight or conceal behind a door or hidden wall shelf. Considering most vault doors are in the basement or otherwise away from the master suite, we highly recommend pairing a vault door with a home safe for your bedroom or master closet.

Resources

• 2024 Product Catalog
• Comparison Table

Why are we asking this?

We’ve talked through outer security, now it’s time to talk about size. The most expensive way to buy a safe is to purchase one that’s too small today, forcing you to purchase another one in the near future when you outgrow your current safe.

When you’re purchasing a gun safe, the number of long guns you have is the best indicator of the ideal size and layout that you need. The three options above simply represent breakpoints where we recommend sizing up based on your current arsenal.

Room to grow your collection

Your safe should have 2x the gun slots for the number of long guns that you own today, giving your collection time to grow over your lifetime and perhaps the next generation. Again, we want to avoid you outgrowing your safe and having to purchase another one any time soon. It’s far better to plan ahead so your collection has time and space to grow.

Room to store everything else

Unless your gun safe is exclusively holding long guns, we’ll generally recommend a size and layout that reserves half of the interior space for long guns. Doing so ensures you still have ample space to store your other guns, valuables, and documents with convenient storage options that keep your safe organized.

Resources

• 2024 Product Catalog
• Comparison Table

Why we’re asking

This feels like a personal question, but don’t worry – we don’t want to know specifics and certainly aren’t sharing your answers with the IRS. The value of your collection correlates with the level of protection you need, so we’re simply asking for a ballpark estimate in order to recommend the right steel thickness and fire protection.

How much protection do you need?

Let’s start with a little peace of mind. While many of our competitors’ entry-level safes come with 12- or 14-gauge steel, we start with 10-gauge American steel. In other words, our entry-level models are more comparable to other companies’ mid- to upper-level safes, featuring 50% to 100% more security than our competitors’ entry-level safes.

10-gauge steel is generally sufficient for folks with less than $25,000 worth of valuables in their safe. We recommend using 3/16-inch steel for safes holding $25k – $50k, and at least ¼-inch steel or more for anything over $50k. For that last bracket, we also recommend adding ballistic-grade armor or additional steel layers to lock your safe down like Fort Knox (pun absolutely intended).

Now let’s talk about fire protection. Just as Fort Knox’s entry-level steel thickness is often 2x thicker than competitors, you’ll find that our fire protection is also well above industry standards.

Discount safe manufacturers glue fireboard inside their safes, which is a huge problem because glue turns to goo at 400 degrees and can ruin everything in your safe. Picture glue residue all over your guns and valuables, and the toxic fumes ruining everything else that the glue doesn’t even touch.

To avoid this problem, Fort Knox uses Type-C Fireboard with shrinkage-compensating Vermiculite that’s stud-welded to the body. In other words, no glue.

Fort Knox offers four standard levels of fire protection, which can be supplemented with additional layers of fireboard. These are:

1. Rated for 60 minutes in 1200 degrees (see Spartan model)
2. Rated for 75 minutes in 1200 degrees (see Maverick model)
3. Rated for 90 minutes in 1680 degrees (see Defender to Legend models)
4. Rated for 120 minutes in 1680 degrees (see Home Safe models)

Generally speaking, folks with under $25k in their safe should be well covered with the first two fire protection bands. If you’re securing over $25k worth of guns, shoot for 1680 degrees for 90 minutes. Finally, if you’re securing more delicate/sensitive items like jewelry, paper documents, and cash, we recommend maximum fire protection like you’ll find in our Home Safes (and can replicate in a gun safe by adding an extra layer of fireboard).

Keep in mind that monetary value isn’t the only factor at play here. You may not have a collection of Rolex watches in your safe that require maximum security, but if there’s anything truly irreplaceable in your safe, we may want to maximize fire protection to ensure your safe contents can survive a five-alarm house fire.

It’s a complex question, and to be honest it might merit a phone call. We’ll do our best to answer here, but if you’re still scratching your head please give us a call or visit your local Fort Knox dealer to discuss it further.

Still have questions?

Still not sure how much steel thickness or fire protection you need? Give us a call at 866-540-7245, we’d love to talk through your situation and find the perfect solution.

Resources

• 2024 Product Catalog
• Comparison Table