I love seeing how people install their secure bar holder kits.
I always sell more bar holder kits than I expect but it is VERY RARE that anyone ever sends me a picture of their final installation.
So today, a buyer sent me a picture of his installation. He left out the standard open bar holder which is JUST FINE. I put mine in because I wanted to have it support the 2×4 when the shed door is open.
It is a great installation. Thanks for sending!
Had a nice order from Fort Collins CO today! Thank to the CSU Rams fan (an assumption).
The order was for 4 open bar holders which will look very sharp since they don’t have UGLY exposed screws like the ones you buy in Home Depot or Lowes.
I believe I have a superior design to what is available in the market an I’m 100% American made. I host my web site out of a Houston web hoster. I use wordpress which was designed partly in Houston. I live in Austin TX. They are manufactured in Hutto TX by a little metal working shop.
My customers are helping me “make America great again” by doing the simple act of trading together!
The first review is always the hardest!!!!
Find the 2×4 black bar holder kit –> HERE <–
All products gotta start somewhere and so things like 5-star reviews on Amazon are pretty exciting for a brand new product. The RAW Bar holders have not just one, but TWO, 5-star reviews on Amazon as of Jan 8, 2017! Check em out.
Find the secure bar holder kit –> HERE <–
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.
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:
When I first decided I would use a 2×4 bar to close my shed instead of a combination of a latch and “something” to hold ONE of the doors closed, I went and bought “ordinary” 2×4 bar holders from Lowes or Home Depot (you can also get a traditional 2×4 closed bar holder or a traditional 2×4 open bar holder from Amazon (these are affiliate links)).
I was pretty happy with these for the most part except that I only had a 2×4 to fasten the bar holders to. This meant I had to add extra wide wood pieces so that I could fasten to my shed. Since I did this “post shed construction” it looked like crap – even after I painted it.
I thought it would be really nice if there was a DIFFERENT kind of 2×4 bar holder which could be installed in only a 2×4 width. I couldn’t find one so then I designed one. Since there were both OPEN and CLOSED 2×4 bar holders in market I created a design for BOTH the open and closed in my compact (because it only takes a 2×4 width) and secure (because you can’t unscrew the screws with the bar in place) 2×4 holders.
Notice that since I have the screws UNDER the bar when it is installed you simply cannot use a screwdriver to remove the bar if the bar is in place. I had to create the holes in the front to get a screwdriver through. This is what makes my 2×4 bar holders so much better than the current bunch.
Here are the drawings which I made using only Apple Keynote to create. It was faster than using a 3D drawing program (at least for me).
I ended up with actual products that look like this below:
Find these innovative Bar Holders here!
This short video says it all!
One of the reasons I came up with the secure 2×4 bar holder or the secure bar holder idea was because I received an 8×12 shed for FREE. All I had to do was move it.
When I got it placed on my property, I noticed that the doors didn’t close all that well. In fact, they were never constructed very well – sag was something that would set in on my doors. It is worth mentioning that the doors were on the 8 foot side and there were two doors that opened in the middle.
I knew I wanted to fix my doors, but I kept running the following thought around in my mind: “There HAS to be a way to fasten these with a single type of latch.”
I detested the idea of having to make it so that one door is always shut fairly solid by having special latches on the inside of the door. Even worse, the special latches had to be at the very top of the door or the very bottom of the door. At the top, Sheri had trouble reaching the latch. At the bottom, it kept getting bumped and interfered with because it was sort of easily bumpable.
I must have tried 6-7 different latches from Lowes. None of them worked. I even kept 1 or 2 of my failed experiments because Lowes was starting to eyeball me when I brought stuff back.
That is how I decided that the only possible solution for me was the idea of a bar. If you don’t know what a bar is, I wrote about what a 2×4 bar is here. Briefly, it is a long “something” – in this case a 2×4 that goes across two swinging doors to create a simple method to keep the doors shut.
I was pretty darned happy with my 2×4 bar, with one exception.
I decided I wanted to put a padlock on my bar to make it just one step harder to get into my shed.
That was when my odyssey began.
But until then, you can see the pictures on this page that show where you need to put those silly latches that are necessary with most 2 door sheds.
(You can just see my invention by visiting the bar holder on my shop page here).
(Or you can see my invention at my secure 2×4 bar holder page on Amazon).