I like his idea of using the lag thread screw eye to run a door bar through. Since the eye is just made by bending the shaft, I would either weld it closed or try to find one with a forged closed eye. Something like the eye on this eye bolt, but with the longer lag screw threads on it.suthdj wrote:http://youtu.be/_gobdsMMLMg cause I can't embed
Couldn't find forged lag thread screw eyes at Home Depot, but they're available online from various companies.
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I would go with 1/2" shaft diameter and instead of a round bar, I would use a 1/2" square solid bar (i.e. not square tubing). I would also not just use one bar. Depending upon whether the door had any glass in it, I would use at least 2 and maybe 3.
The main thing that I like about this solution is that you can tell at a glance whether the door is secure before going to bed at night. With a standard dead bolt, you have to get closer to see if the bolt is extended past the door and into the door jamb, but even then, it's possible for the bolt to not be fully extended. I do not trust my wife and daughter to lock the doors correctly since I've noticed a few times when they "locked" the door, but it was still possible for me to just pull the door open without unlocking it. As with most women, it doesn't do any good to point out their mistake either.
One of the problems with protecting windows in a house is that if you put bars on them, it makes the house look like it lives in a high crime area. On the other hand, if your windows are of the multi-pane type, you can custom built your bars so that they are placed exactly in the same place as the vertical and horizontal pieces of the frames for the panes and mount them on the inside of the windows and thus they will be hidden from the casual observer outside.
The windows on my house came with this type of sash lock.
It's diecast zinc and the handle on the lock often breaks when you attempt to latch it closed. Windows don't get opened much here in the Houston area since the air-conditioner tends to get run most of the year. Every time that I've broke it, it was after opening the window for cleaning of the bottom area of the dirt that accumulated over the year. Seems that every time I do that, about half of the locks break when I'm relocking the windows afterwards. My solution to this was to just get a small piece of stainless steel that would extend into the locking area on the other part of the window while also fitting flush with the inner portion of the window. I then mount the diecast zinc lock over it so that it looks like it has a regular lock on it. I cut off the actual part of the latch that rotates into the window so the lock only *looks* like it works. The only way to open a window is to unscrew the screws and remove the lock. I figure that if someone breaks the window and tries to operate the latch, they will think that they have unlocked it and once they realize it won't open, they'll either start looking for a side lock or just figure that it has been painted shut. :) For them to open it, even if they know what I've done, they're going to have to break at least two panes of glass and then reach in through the broken glass and remove four screws. If I'm home, that's going to slow them down enough that I can address the situation on a more "personal" level. If I'm not here, there are other measures that will make them wish that they had chosen an easier house to burglarize. I haven't done this to all the windows in the house yet. It's kind of an ongoing project as the window latches break.
The fact of the matter though is that all we can do is make it more difficult for a burglar to enter our house. We cannot make it completely impervious to attack. A determined attacker could enter a house through a brick wall with just a sledge hammer. A wood sided house would be even easier. A cinder block house would be more difficult, but ONLY if the voids are filled with rebar that is tied to the rebar in the slab and concrete.