When I first made my 2×4 bar holder setup with traditional 2×4 bar holders, I made about 3,000 trips to Lowes and Home Depot trying to find the right stuff (slight exaggeration).
Once I put a handle on my 2×4 bar and I had a nice setup for sliding the bar back and forth and removing, I discovered that there just seemed to be no good way to add something so simple as a padlock.
While a padlock won’t keep VERY determined crooks out of my shed – they could bring a circular saw or saws-all and get in – it would “up the ante” on difficulty at least. In fact if you want to think about security in the correct way, you have to assume it is a bit of a marginal returns versus marginal cost concept. In other words, the value of what you’re protecting must be at least worth the COST to criminals of going for it. If you think about an extreme case, the use of encryption causes crooks to have very expensive ‘cracking’ capability, both in computer hardware, time, and expertise. So the point is to make it hard enough that they’ll just move on to an area where they know the score is easier. That is all.
So here is a bulleted list of the escalation in security and the higher cost (equipment/speed) to break your security for a shed.
- Standard shed hardware – Simple crowbar to bust and about 15 seconds.
- 2×4 bar holder with some jerry rigged lock – electric screwdriver and about 2 minutes.
- secure 2×4 bar holder with some jerry rigged lock – crowbar on the lock – 15 seconds.
- secure 2×4 bar holder WITH special 2×4 bar holder with lock tab – circular saw on bar – 10 minutes + power source + noise risk.
- NOT SOLD YET HERE (as of Dec 2016) – Steel 2×4 bar with Secure 2×4 bar holder kit – Now we are in blow torch territory!
- etc.
- etc.
So you see you can make each step harder and by adding a locking tab to the secure bar holder I can make the job quite a bit harder for a crook.
Here is my original closed bar holder drawing with a locking tab:
Here is the secure bar holder kit in action – without a padlock on m own shed. (I do wished I was a better carpenter).
Here is a gallery of my current designs using the secure locking tab:
