Door #12, Take a look and give it a shot.
Here we are looking at the backside of a commercial retail building. We have a 1 story masonry block building with a metal frame/jamb and a set of outward swinging metal double doors. With it being outward swinging on the backside of a commercial it is fairly safe to assume that our primary lock is a panic bar or at least was at some point and may have been removed. We won’t know until we start to force it. You can ignore what appears to be two sets of black bolts both high and low on the middle of the two doors. These are holes from previous bolts that you would have been able to see.
We have an obvious bolt pattern showing that we have a secondary security feature to this door. This is a fairly run of the mill drop bar bolt pattern when we are looking from the outside. It may be a little more significant due to the three mounts per door instead of two, but it is still fairly common.
Once we see the inside it is apparent that this door is a little more secure than it appears from the outside. We can see that the stock panic bar is still in place and would be considered our primary lock. We have multiple secondary locks. If you look above the panic bar you can see we have a slide bolt that was blind from the outside. We also see our drop bar mount setup, which in this picture does not have the bar in place.
When we look closer at the drop bar mounts you can see they are designed much better than our typical setups. The mounts are one piece of steel instead of each set of bolts having its own mount. It is also welded to the skin of the door on both ends of the mount.
This presents a couple of problems that you wouldn’t normally find with individual mounts. The solid mount all the way across will make it very difficult if not impossible to drive these bolts through with a set of irons. As you attack one set of bolts, the other bolts will hold that steel mount in place preventing the heads from being driven through. The welds also add to these problems. If you attacked the bolts with a saw allowing the heads to fall off, you still have the welds holding the bar to the door. This is why it is important for us to move back and forth from conventional irons work and saw techniques. If we cut these bolts attempting to drop the mounts off, we may not realize that the welds are present until we go back to conventional techniques and try to pry the door open. Welds can be intimidating and when done right can add significant strength to a homemade security system, however when not done properly (especially when welded to the thin door skin) it can actually weaken the holding metal for the mounts. Either way after these bolts have been defeated we should attack this door conventionally again.
Lastly you can see the 3/8 inch steel drop bar that is put in place and goes all the way across both doors. This again stresses the importance of getting out into our buildings and recognizing the variables in these drop bar systems. It may just take away some of the surprise when we go to bat against them on the real thing. It is a decent set of doors, but with a solid Plan A, B and C I am confident we can defeat them.
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