A few weeks ago my GunVault safe failed to open. I contacted the company, and they said a replacement unit would be shipped out.

The replacement arrived a couple of days ago. I immediate put it into action.

Of course, the first thing I looked at was the unlock mechanism. It appears to be the same thing: a little steel cord. So I get the feeling it could break again. But of course, looks can be deceiving… I can’t get inside the mechanism to fully examine it nor a prior unit that was in an unbroken state so… I can’t really say for sure if the problem will never happen again.

I can say there appear to be a few minor changes tho. The keypad buttons stuck out a little more and had a bit nicer feel to them, a little more definitive, not as sensitive. I’m hip to that change. When the door opens, it doesn’t make as much noise, which is good. And the foam lining also feels better. Minor things, but it feels like improvements were made.

So I’ll give GunVault credit for standing behind their product and replacing the faulty product no questions no charge (even providing a UPS return shipping label to ship back the failed vault, which I wouldn’t be surprised if they reconditioned and resold, which is fine).

Do I trust it? Well, I’m wary, that’s for sure. It’ll always sit in the back of my head that it may fail when I least need it to. Crazy thing is, just this past weekend Karl told me how he was able to get his V-Line pure mechanical lockbox totally locked up. I forgot to get the details about the failure from him but geez… confidence is not high here. Granted, anything mechanical can and will eventually fail, but when it’s a life-saving device you really want those chances of failure as close to zero as possible.

For now, I’ll continue to use the replacement GunVault unit. But I’m going to be seeking an alternative solution.