You cannot casually drill a safe. Not talking about your hardware store variety of safe, or a 'fireproof safe'. But a legit safe like you'd find in an ATM has a number of countermeasures to ensure that its not possible to drill the safe in a short amount of time.
Mixed into the steel is usually a number of drill-bit-breaking things like hardened ceramic/steel ball bearings, odd shaped chunks of metal, plastics which all react differently to different attacks in order to ensure that one attack does not compromise the door and that its near-impossible to do quickly.
Bigger safes employ the use of fancy mixtures of concrete and metal to resist even more aggressive attacks like thermal lancing etc by turning the whole door/wall into a giant heat-sink.
I can understand how it's possible to design quite strong small safes. But what about big bank safes? Are the same design techniques used?
If not, why bother going through the front door? Isn't that door mostly for show? Aren't the other five sides mostly concrete and rebar? Isn't that easier to go through? Or do big safes really have thick steel on all six sides?
Depends on design and cost. Your thinking of a vault. Vaults have a solid door (as described above) and essentially its layers of security. The other 5 sides sometimes are the weakest point, but will still take significant amounts of time to penetrate on any properly designed vault.
No point in putting an extremely expensive vault door in a room that's got just concrete and re-bar.
The other thing is to make it harder to access those other walls as opposed to the front where you can walk up to it.
Drilling through the generic zinc pot metal that everything that can't be made of plastic seems to be made of nowadays could leave one with a wildly inaccurate idea of how difficult it is to drill in hardened steel.
Sure there is. It's simple. If there are abrasives and cutting tools hard enough to drill rock, they will also carve through whatever steel alloy you care to bring to the party. Admittedly brick isn't the optimal choice for demonstrating my point but I can't find my favorite video of this guy drilling a sink drain out of a solid granite boulder so... Also, we are talking about ATM housings, not the internal cash box. You really think they're constructed out of unobtanium?
Took him 8 minutes on what's probably mild steel. A high security enclosure might use something like hardened cast vanadium steel with carbide chips. You'll go through a sack of those drill bits even going through half an inch.
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I think you may underestimate the capabilities of a portable drill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyq7xBUhsAo
Hell, depending on the gauge you could probably carve out a 3" hole with a dremel tool and a diamond bit in a reasonable amount of time.
Enthusiast safe tech here.
You cannot casually drill a safe. Not talking about your hardware store variety of safe, or a 'fireproof safe'. But a legit safe like you'd find in an ATM has a number of countermeasures to ensure that its not possible to drill the safe in a short amount of time.
Mixed into the steel is usually a number of drill-bit-breaking things like hardened ceramic/steel ball bearings, odd shaped chunks of metal, plastics which all react differently to different attacks in order to ensure that one attack does not compromise the door and that its near-impossible to do quickly. Bigger safes employ the use of fancy mixtures of concrete and metal to resist even more aggressive attacks like thermal lancing etc by turning the whole door/wall into a giant heat-sink.
Safes are really cool.
I can understand how it's possible to design quite strong small safes. But what about big bank safes? Are the same design techniques used?
If not, why bother going through the front door? Isn't that door mostly for show? Aren't the other five sides mostly concrete and rebar? Isn't that easier to go through? Or do big safes really have thick steel on all six sides?
Depends on design and cost. Your thinking of a vault. Vaults have a solid door (as described above) and essentially its layers of security. The other 5 sides sometimes are the weakest point, but will still take significant amounts of time to penetrate on any properly designed vault.
No point in putting an extremely expensive vault door in a room that's got just concrete and re-bar.
The other thing is to make it harder to access those other walls as opposed to the front where you can walk up to it.
there's no comparing brick with composite/hard plate steel
Drilling through the generic zinc pot metal that everything that can't be made of plastic seems to be made of nowadays could leave one with a wildly inaccurate idea of how difficult it is to drill in hardened steel.
Sure there is. It's simple. If there are abrasives and cutting tools hard enough to drill rock, they will also carve through whatever steel alloy you care to bring to the party. Admittedly brick isn't the optimal choice for demonstrating my point but I can't find my favorite video of this guy drilling a sink drain out of a solid granite boulder so... Also, we are talking about ATM housings, not the internal cash box. You really think they're constructed out of unobtanium?
It's not fast but it's possible to cut steel too with cordless drill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj12WdVhOCc
Took him 8 minutes on what's probably mild steel. A high security enclosure might use something like hardened cast vanadium steel with carbide chips. You'll go through a sack of those drill bits even going through half an inch.