first off, i realize that nothing will stop a determined thief who really wants my bike, but i’m not taking any chances
this summer, i plan to bring my mountain bike into work and bike over to some of the local resturants for lunch, and since i’ll be leaving my bike unattended, i’ll need a good way to secure it to prevent theft
it’s a Trek 4500 mountain bike, i know it’s not a top of the line bike, but it’s nice, and it’s MINE dammit, i intend to keep it that way…
i’ve read of the problems with cylindrical locks ahem Bic Pen ahem, apparently this issue has been solved with new tubular locks, but it’s a risk i’m not willing to take, so at the bike store today, i picked up a Master Lock Street Links chain/lock combo, a Hexagonal-link chain made of a Titanium-Boron alloy, and a heavy duty Master key lock (no tubular cylinder lock)
this thing is heavy and intimidating, looks alone, it sends a message to a would-be bike thief, that message?.. “Fk off!" (i believe that’s the “unofficial” designation in the biking industry, the “New York” style chains are referred to as "Fk off!” chains)
supposedly, a would-be thief seeing this kind of chain will move on to easier locks, and as an added advantage, the chain can also be used to…well, you get where i’m going here… if you see a bike thief
apparently, it can withstand cutting forces up to 30,000 pounds, heck, the chain looks heavy enough to lift my car
so, anyone in areas with high bike theft have experience with the “New York” style chains? any good?
No experience with it, but one word of advice - if you have a quick-release front wheel, be sure to, somehow, lock it both to the frame of the bike, and to whatever the bike is locked to.
Hmmm, I can’t say that I’ve ever parked my bike in a truly high-theft area, but still, I doubt that any thief is going to try cutting through any lock during the daytime. Campus security, when I was in Claremont, made it clear to us that thefts occurred only at night.
If you can, remove all the decals form the bike. If the logos are painted on some folks (like me) use electrical tape to cover them. The idea being to make your bike look as non discript as possible thus reducing the “bling” appeal.
Also take note of the serial number (it should be etched on the underside of the bottom bracket). If your bike goes missing and turns up at the local police station, that number will make it easier to get back.
Looks good to me. I can’t tell from the picture if the sleeve is secured or not, but if it isn’t you might want to zip tie the sleeve at both ends so it doesn’t slide around on the chain.
Besides locking your QR wheels to the frame you also want to lock your saddle to the frame, especially if it’s QR. You can do this with a loop of bicycle chain or cable. The only theft I’ve ever experienced is my saddle being stolen when I was in Colorado.
If you’re going to be locking your bike to a post or sign of some kind you should wrap the top tube with an old innertube and zip tie the ends.
I’d run that chain through the front tire as well as the frame.
Then, you might just want to run something like this through the seat rails and rear wheel (that thing is pretty small). It’s not going to stop a guy with bolt cutters, but it will stop a guy with an allen wrench from ganking your saddle. A bike shop might sell it as just a lock for your gear – like locking your helmet to the frame or something. The Kryptonite site sells it as a gera lock for skiers.
FWIW, my errand bike is old and used, so I just use a U-lock on it.
When I put my nice bike on the car, I usually run one of those small cable locks through the seat-rails and rear wheel. The front fork locks to the car rack.
The only bike thing I’ve ever had stolen was a rear derailleur off an old mountain bike. It was the only decent component on the bike. I don’t think there’s any feasible way to prevent that.
How about a u-lock AND a cable with a combo? They’d have to carry around a variety of tools, then. The trick it seems (to some extent?) is not to make your bike unstealable, but to make it look harder to steal than other bikes and not worth the effort. If it’s a very nice one in addition to the front wheel you might also want to tie the SEAT down if it’s on a quick-release system-- they have widgets that do this.
My husband knew a bike messenger in Seattle who, as a theft prevention device (and to save time on 5-minute deliveries) wouldn’t actually use a lock but would just lean his bike up against something and lay a new pair of, like, small girl’s pink panties with flowers and such over the bike seat. No one ever touched his bike.
There’s an interesting video floating around the net of two guys who try to see exactly how hard it is to steal a bike in broad daylight in New York city. They use several different methods, including using a hacksaw on the chain and a hammer on the lock. In many cases the guy hacked away at the locking mechanism for about 5 minutes in broad daylight, usually in fairly crowded areas like near where a subway entrance was. At no time did anyone harass them or try and prevent them from taking the bike in any way. At the very end a police car even drove by the guy and didn’t give him so much as a second glance.
Mine was stolen in broad daylight by cutting a cable lock. This was in Cambridge, MA, behind the building but facing a busy parking lot. IIRC, I normally used a U-lock to secure the frame and front wheel to the rack, and a fairly light-duty cable lock to secure the rear wheel. (The actual metal part of the cable was probably 1/4" or less.) One day I left the U-lock home and just used the cable lock to secure the bike to the rack. When I got out of work at 5pm it was gone.
Personally I’d trust a U-lock more than a chain. I think it’d be easier to cut a chain than a solid steel rod. Nobody sells the cylinder lock with the “ballpoint pen” vulnerability anymore.
I plan on adding at least one other lock to the arsenal, probably a flat-key U-Lock (i still don’t trust the cylinder locks), but the Street Links will be the primary deterrent, only problem is, the sodding thing weighs almost 10 pounds, guess i’ll be lugging it in a backpack when i go to lunch
the more research i’ve done on the chain indicates that it takes a minimum of 5 minutes to even dent the thing, and even then it’s not a sure thing the thief will be able to cut it, heck, i’ve heard of these chains breaking the very bolt cutters the thief tries to use on them, and i’d imagine the Steel/Titanium/Boron case-hardened links would dull any blade used against it, all the other “foolproof” ways to cut it are far to obvious to be effective, i mean if someone sees a thief with an acetylene torch or a grinder wheel, it’s going to be a little obvious the bike isn’t theirs
apparently the only effective means to cut the “New York” style chain is The Jaws of Life, and lets be honest, how many thieves have a set of TJOL at their disposal…
(especially in Southern New Hampshire and Southern Maine, not exactly high crime areas, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry…)
what? me, paranoid?..who wants to know?
yes, yes, i know, nothing will deter a determined thief, the “Jedi Chain”* as i call it is primarilly to tell the thief to frell off and find a different target
*you don’t want this bike
this isn’t the bike you’re looking for
you can go about your business
move along…
i got a new u-lock for free from Kryptonite when they had their problems. I also have one from Planet Bike that works just as well and is cheaper. They can’t steal them like they used to. THe locks and keys are different-real funky looking.
I just lock the back tire and frame to the post, never had a problem here. There you might, lock the front tire with a cable to the frame and back tire. Park it in a visible spot, in the middle of a rack. That chain might work just as well, but do your really want to lug that heavy thing around all the time?
Cutting a U-lock is a piece of cake. I’ve done it before and a standard Krypto takes 2, maybe 3 seconds, tops. Furthermore, cutting a chain takes twice the effort of a U as you have to break the link in two places (FWIW each link is as close to solid steel rod as imaginable). However, this is a moot point as it’s rather daft to cut the chain when it’s easier to break the lock.
And with that we delve into the (rudimentary) physics of lock breaking. A standard U-lock (for example: a 30-40 dollar 12 inch Krypto) doesn’t stand a chance against a set of decent bolt cutters. As the pinchers clinch onto the U part of the lock, concentrated pressure causes the shaft to snap. Actually, it’s quite interesting to see a U that’s lost a fight with cutters. Right where the pincers dug in you’ll see a set of small nocks, and I mean small like a millimetre or two, and through the remainder of the shaft is a perfectly straight split. Thus, cutting a lock isn’t, for lack of a better example, like taking scissors to sausage. The pincers don’t actually cause the metal to fold or slice; instead, they score the metal and make it susceptible to the pressure needed to break it.
To this end a heavy duty chain link is better than the hook of a U-lock. Take a look at your U when it’s open (i.e. in the U and the straight bar are separate). The U has two terminals. One; a divot where it meets with the sliding lock plate, and two; a little L shaped piece that sits in the body of the straight bar. If the U is snapped, the L shaped bit is free to move around and slides right out of the bar. That took one cut. With a chain link two cuts are necessary to free it from the other links. More work? Yes, but it’s entirely inconsequential for two reasons:
The lock’s probably easier to break than a link.
Cut the lock and the chain can be sold. A thinking thief will see added value to a bike secured with an NYC chain.
Another advantage of the chain is that it eliminates some of the other design flaws associated with the standard U. For even if you have a mini-U as the lock on a chain, it’s near impossible to get the leverage needed to snap it using less conventional means. It’s worth not glossing over this point as some of these “less conventional” means can be carried out without totting around a very conspicuous set of bolt cutters.
Thus, on the whole I think an NYC chain is the right place to start however, the chain is crap without a good lock. At the moment I’ve forgotten the lock of choice for those in high theft areas, but it’s something you can get at the local hardware store for a tenner. I’ll try to dig up the brand later.
And moving on…
Mactech
Specific advice:
Wear the chain around your waist as if it were a belt. Also to save time throw a carabineer on the final link and use that as a belt buckle. This way you don’t have to actually lock the chain around yourself. Trust me, it’s worth it. I’ve heard the horrors of people who’ve locked chains to themselves. Yeah, it makes for a good bar story, but it’s a crappy Friday night.
And some more general thoughts:
Don’t ignore the advice of myself and some of the above posters, make your bike look less valuable. Strip the decals, park it next to the nicest bike on the block, do ANYTHING, to make and opportunistic thief gloss right over you’re ride and move on to the next.
When parking try to find a rack and do anything you can to get your bike in the middle. It’ll be less visible and more difficult to get at. A true win-win situation for you.
Here’s a question, along the lines of the foot-long metal spike-- is it unethical, when you lock your bike up and leave it somewhere, to also unhook the brake cable from one of the canti arms? I have this nice image of the new owner of my bike unexpectedly flying through the first red light. . .
Forgive me I was unclear, I had a hearty glass of vino before posting that.
(Before we go to far here’s my full disclosure: though I’ve cut through Us, I’ve never tried to break a link. What follows is based on my experience with Us and reasonable expectations of link breaking)
For the sake of argument we’ll assume that the steel in an NYC chain is of equal quality and strength to that of a U-lock. Now the links in an NYC chain are thick, depending on the brand you’re looking at 7-11 millimetres in diameter. Thus, to separate two links you need a 7-11mm gap in one of the links. This could be on the straight part of the link or the rounded end, it doesn’t matter.
The problem is that when breaking steel with bolt cutters you don’t get a very large gap, rather you create a fracture barley bigger than a millimetre. With a chain this means that you’ll need to make a second cut in order to get a gap big enough to separate the links. (Alternatively the broken link could be bent but that’s a horse of a different feather.)
A U-lock is more vulnerable because it is not a closed circle. A hairline split in the U part of the lock is all that’s needed to cause the hook to rotate inside the body and fall right out. Again, look at a U when it’s open, that’s to say when the body (where the key goes) and the U are separate. After splitting a U, the end with a divot will still be firmly attached to the body due to the lock plate. However, the hook (the L shaped bit) is free to move in any direction as if it were unlocked.
In short, a chain is less vulnerable because you need a gap equal to the diameter of a link in order to separate links (on either the straight or rounder part). A U-lock needs only a hairline fracture in order compromise the integrity enough to separate the U from the shaft.
the SL chain has one link that;s longer than the others, you secure the chain by passing one of the normal links thru the long link and securing the lock to the exposed end of the small link
when the chain is locked, there’s almost no prying/cutting room in there, certainly not enough for bolt cutters, and there’s no way a prybar could fit
as an added point to the lock arsenal, i added a Master Quantum 15 braided cable lock to secure the front tire to the frame so i don’t have to remove the front tire when i lock it, it’s got the revised tubular cylinder lock, which is supposedly Bic-proof, but i’ll believe it when i see it, the primary line of defense is the SL chain, i’d imagine having 2 different style locks will add some time to a would-be thieves attempt to steal the bike.
yes, i know cable locks are dramatically less secure than U-locks or chains, but this does use a 15MM woven cable (increasing the length of time it takes to cut thru), and the only purpose of this lock is to make sure nobody walks off with my QR front tire… Hmmm, wonder if that cable would fit thru my seatpost, i could unhook the seat, thread it thru the cable and secure the seat to the frame and front tire…
(my local bike shop only carries the Master line, but seeing as Master has a long history of producing reliable, safe, secure locks, it doesn’t bother me, i’d trust a Master lock over a Kryptonite any day, then again, i’m biased )
the bike is locked to a steel light pole when i go to pick up lunch, and it’s in a high traffic area, it takes me longer to lock up the bike than it does to pick up lunch…
i like the idea of disabling the brakes as well, i have no pity for thieves, and if a bike thief hurts themselves if they’re able to steal my bike, i just hope they don’t damage the bike in the process, they can kill themselves for all i care, without getting into a Pit thread, i believe criminals have no rights, the instant they decide to steal, they forefit their rights, after all, stealing is a concious decision, they don’t have to steal, if they didn’t steal, they wouldn’t be in the situation they find themselves in…
riding down a hill towards traffic, discovering the brakes don’t work…
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