I have grandchildren. I love my grandchildren very much. I earnestly desire for them grow up safely and to enjoy a healthy and productive adulthood. I also own handguns. I have other handguns that are entrusted to my care periodically for review. One facet of my strategy for helping my grandchildren grow up safely is keeping handguns and other firearms out of their hands until they are old enough to know how to use them responsibly.
I own a full-size gun safe. The gun safe was getting a little full. If I was going to keep my grandchildren safe, then I needed space for another handgun or two. I also desired access to a handgun elsewhere in the house — other than right by the gun safe. So I decided that a handgun vault would be a useful addition to my safe gun storage plan.
The Search
To help find an appropriate safe, I entered the phrase “American Made Handgun Safe” in duckduckgo.com. One of the first returns was www.libertysafe.com. When I clicked on the supplied link, I was glad to read that “Liberty Safe is the #1 Producer of American Made Gun Safes.” Based on that information, I browsed through their product line and decided that their HDV-150X Biometric Handgun Vault was just what I was looking for. I contacted Liberty Safe, and they were kind enough to provide me with a sample for testing and evaluation.
First Impressions
At 9.05 pounds, the heavy, 14-gauge steel construction of the HDV-150X was quickly apparent. The tight-fit steel body has pry-resistant seems and reinforced interior hinges. The foam-lined interior has room for two full-sized handguns.
The vault can be opened by a quick access fingerprint sensor, a five-digit entry code, or a key. It can store up to 30 fingerprints in its memory.
The vault is powered by a rechargeable lithium battery, and recharges the battery using a USB-C charger.
It has interior LED lighting, a two year warranty, an included security cable, and holes for fastening the vault to a shelf, drawer bottom, or other surface. It was priced at $219.99 at the time of this writing.
Made Where?
I was shocked and bitterly disappointed to read the words, “Made in China” on the product box. One of the primary reasons that I was interested in the HDV-150X was because I had believed it to be American-made. I could not recall anything being written about it being made in mainland China when had I browsed the website. I went to web.archive.org to review the website, and discovered that I had not read carefully enough. The description of the HDV-150X includes the words, “This imported handgun vault…” It is important to read the fine print. Let the buyer beware.
Further browsing of their handgun vault inventory seems to indicate that all of the vaults sold by Liberty Safe are imported. On the other hand, a random sampling of their full-size gun safes found all of the selected safes to be made in the USA.
If anyone is aware of a handgun vault that is not made in mainland China, then I would be grateful for that information. Please email me at thomaskchristianson AT gmail dot com. I would be especially interested in handgun vaults that are made in the USA.
The Quick Start Guide
A simple, FOUR-page quick start guide was on top of the HDV-150X in the product box. Set up was extremely easy. Using the guide, I was able to quickly enter my fingerprint and a 5-digit code. After testing the vault a few times to assure myself that the fingerprint, code, and key were all working well, I placed the handguns that I was currently testing into the vault, and closed the lid.
I was interested to note that one of the most emphasized items in the quick start guide was “Do Not Store the Keys in the Vault”. I would have been surprised at this advice except that one of my aunts, who was otherwise quite wise and intelligent, nonetheless had the exasperating habit of locking the keys to her safes in her safes. When I cared for her estate after her death, I ended up donating several fireproof safes with broken locks to a local thrift store.
Testing
For more than a month, I opened the HDV-150X an average of several times a day in order to get a sense of its battery life and how reliably it would operate under varying conditions. I opened it first thing in the morning when I was just getting out of bed. I opened it last thing at night before I went to sleep. I opened it in the middle of the night when I let the dog out with my brain foggy with sleep.
I found the fingerprint sensor to be a bit finicky at times regarding placement, while the code and the key each functioned well 100% of the time. I recommend using the code on a daily basis for at least a week or so after first acquiring the vault to firmly implant it in your memory. I made a few memory errors early on, but entering the code soon became second nature.
After five failed attempts with the fingerprint scanner and/or code, the vault will reject further input for a full minute. In an emergency, if someone tried to open the vault a couple of times with the fingerprint scanner without success, I would recommend switching to the code before they find themselves locked out of the vault for a full minute at a time when seconds count.
I did not find the LED light to be particularly helpful. It was placed too low in the safe, and was too tightly focused a beam to be truly useful. My night vision would be ruined by the one extremely bright spot of light, while the rest of the safe remained cloaked in darkness.
Biometric Befuddlement
On the 12th day of my testing, I accidentally cut the index finger of my left hand while cleaning the blade of a knife. That was the same finger whose fingerprint I had programmed into the sensor. Obviously, the sensor could not read the fingerprint through a bandage. Even after the bandage was removed, the sensor could not recognize the injured fingerprint for several days. In fact, it would require ten days of healing before the sensor again had a better than 50% success rate in recognizing the fingerprint. I learned several lessons away from this incident. The first takeaway is that I recommend entering all ten of your fingerprints into the scanner. Then if one or more of your digits is damaged, dirty, or otherwise unreadable, there will be others that you can use instead.
A second takeaway is that I do not think that it would be particularly smart to depend upon a so-called “smart gun”. These guns, designed to require biometric data recognition prior to allowing them to be fired, have been in the process of development for many years now. The “Biofire”, from smartgun.com claims to be the first effective production firearm utilizing this concept. Based upon the biometric limitations I have experienced using the HDV-150X or opening my smartphone, I would never trust my life to a firearm that depended on biometrics for permission to fire.
A third takeaway is to recommend that you make sure to have the code well memorized, and to keep those keys handy. You never know when you might need them.
Battery Life
After opening the HDV-150X an average of more than once a day for more than a month, I still had not depleted the original factory charge. I finally decided to do my best to run down the battery. I sat down, and in a single session opened and closed the vault using the fingerprint scanner more than 100 times.
The battery was still going strong. I don’t know how much longer it will last before it needs to be recharged. I do know that it has held up well to more than a month of very heavy use.
Conclusions
There are a lot of things that I like about the HDV-150X. I like its heavy-duty construction. I like the fact that it can be securely fastened to a shelf or similar surface. I like the ease of opening it with the fingerprint sensor. I like being able to open it with a code, and even with a key if something like an EMP or Carrington Event should damage its electronics. I like its good battery life.
There are a couple of things that I don’t like about the vault. I don’t like that it is made in mainland China, and I don’t like the fact that the fingerprint sensor can be a little finicky at times.
All in all, the Liberty Safe HDV-150X Biometric Handgun Vault seems to be a reasonable choice for safe home handgun storage.
Disclaimer
Liberty Safe was kind enough to provide me with a sample of their HDV-150X Handgun Vault for testing and evaluation. I tried not to let their kindness interfere with my objectivity in this review, and believe I have succeeded. I did not receive any other financial or other inducement to mention any vendor, product, or service in this article.