Hurricane tornado disaster resist door.

I searched around with no luck locally which is to be expected and searched regionally also nothing.
The price is king of high, typically 1,000 to 3,000 and up so basically 10x the cost of a regular door.
Then I found a bank vault door frame almost in my own back yard. It weighs 360lb and I got it for $35. It's so heavy because it's filled with concrete.
The place I got it from says they don't think they have the vault door that goes with it but that they will look for it.
If they have the vault door I'm buying it for sure.
The opening is only about 30 incest wide but I can cut it in half and expand it out to what ever I want if they don't find the door that matches it.
The only thing that sucks about it is this is the only one.
The good thing is now that I have one I can copy the basic design.
There isn't any point in wasting 1,000 to 3,000 when I can build my own since I can weld, fabricate and mix my own high strength concrete.

 

Yep, it held

 

Yup!! And build strong.. Gotta love life in the mountains!

 

Interesting. I have just started making plans for a door for my place. I'm going to weld up my frame , then sandwich a steel plate between layers of wood, for decor reasons. As I will also have to weld up the frame to strengthen the jambs for more security. But what you are working with, will be much more secure than what I'm doing, but like the pic above showed , no sense in having a door that's comparably stronger than the wall.

 

I was going to cast the door into my ballistic concrete or concrete blocks filled with ballistic concrete.
Plus this part of new Mexico doesn't get strong long duration earthquakes.

 

Southern New Mexico has had a couple bad ones, not often, but it isn't immune. I get a kick out of the steel doors in houses with a fiber board, sheet rock, and siding wall and un barred windows. Human nature being what it is though, most idiots try to break down the door, professional burglars go thru the windows.

 

I built a house for a guy a few years back, while a buddy of mine was having one built by one of those big builders. I was doing most of the labor myself. He kept bragging about how fast they were building his compared to the one I was building. He came by and looked at mine one day , then asked me to come look at his , I don't remember why. But then he noticed something different in the wall framing , they were putting styrofoam exterior wal sheathing on his house , were I was using 1/2 inch plywood. Both houses were going to have vinyl siding, but he realized you could kick a hole in the wall faster than you could kick open the door.

 

I don't know how just throwing on an insulating cover is considered sheathing. I didn't even think that was code.
In Maine we put 1/2 OSB over the studs then the Styrofoam.

Turns out the 1960 built city house I live in now was built the cheap way. Sheathing over the studs with no planks or ply wood, I'm guessing they didn't have OSB in 1960.

 

I would incorporate the frame into a concrete pour rather than use block-even filled block. The concrete will be stronger.

 

Any idea of how much this door will weigh to open?

 

The original safe door probably weighs 200 to 300 pounds.
Which reminds me I better go get some money from the bank and go back and see if they found the door.

 

Make a sliding door with top and bottom track, problem solved.

 

I see a lot of steel doors here in town - I even have one. But most are on flimsy frames with gaps to structural members and have cheap locks.

Ours is set in a frame of doubled 2x4s and has 3 inch deck screws in the hinges - barely adequate.

 

Well there is no matching safe door, it was removed years earlier.

 

From my Navy days I remember the ship doors could take hurricane force waves without even cracking the paint. I've seen a few used for storm shelters for hurricanes and tornadoes. You can often find them quite reasonably online from Marine Salvage shops. You want the ones with a central wheel and not individual "Dogs" so you can lock it from debris hitting mechanism. Here's an inside view.

 

Just the thought I had, @fmhuff , while reading thru the posts here. On board the aircraft carriers (and other larger vessels), they even have double-wide watertight doors, though I honestly don't recall whether they were quick-acting (with the central wheel), or individual dogs, to secure. There's a bit of routine maintenance you would have to keep up with (mostly keeping the joints lubricated, and ensuring the door seal stays in good shape), but they're definitely built to last.

On board the carrier I was on, we also had armored decks, and all the deck hatches were just as thick....and heavy! Took some whiz bang engineering, to make it so you could even open & close them!!
Consider the non-armed hatch:

Versus the armed hatch:

and you can see how much more stout they really were! Believe the one above is from an old cruiser or battle wagon, and around 5" thick. Ours were 3-4 inches, but still pretty thick! Definitely proof against most things!!

 

The plan now is to use this safe door frame to secure my most valuable possession.
My well.