There’s a website called Instructables, where people provide step-by-step details for building various things. I came across it a couple of years ago when I was searching for a circuit diagram for something I was building using a Raspberry Pi.
A lot of the stuff on it is extremely… well, let’s say ‘niche’. I mean, I’m sure there is a lot of demand for a Celtic Knot Rolling Pin, a Rubber Band Wallet (made using a 3D printer), or a multitude of tacky-looking lamps and pendants. But I’m equally sure that there is a lot of demand to quickly recapture the people involved and get them safely back inside their padded cells.
This one arrived in my inbox this morning. Someone has created a clever concealed safe that looks like a piece of firewood.
Actually, ‘secret safes’ that look like other things is a very popular area on Instructables. Ones that look like books are common. Then there’s an ‘underground secret safe’ (aka buried jar), one concealed in a speaker, one in a torch, ones in aerosol cans, ones gouged into wooden drawers and ‘hidden’ by a sticker, one in a jar of mayonnaise, another in a tin of soup… and it goes on. In almost all cases, the act of creating the ‘safe’ destroys the item being used as the disguise and prevents it from fulfilling its original purpose.
Probably about one Instructable in a thousand is actually something you might need, and of those, many are extremely complex. The rest are submitted by kids.
The firewood safe is certainly slightly clever in terms of the craftsmanship, but I can’t help wondering if anyone in their right mind would risk putting large sums of money or valuable items in something which looks like firewood, is stored on a stack of firewood, and is located right next to a fire which utilises said stack of firewood.
It certainly redefines the word ‘safe’.