I’m not looking for anyone to tell me how I could have done it better - there are already enough bicycle thieves out there and we don’t need to swell their ranks by giving them advice on an internet message board.
I lost my keys to both my bike locks sometime after Friday. We’re in the middle of packing everything in the house, so I’ve been through every place they could have been. They were on a separate key ring (dumb) and kept in the same pocket as my large key ring, key to the lock up and all my change (dumber). Somewhere over the sweaty weekend, I’m sure I paid for a coffee and pulled the keys out of my pocket by accident and dropped them. Ain’t in the house, could be anywhere of a hundred odd places I’ve been in the last 3-4 days (dumbest).
So today’s the day I buy a new lock and take off the old one. The cable took about five minute with the cordless sawzall. The u-lock melted the teeth on the hacksaw blade of the sawzall, then took out a wood-metal blade. Out comes the Dremel with the reinforced cutting wheel. That works okay, but I go through two cutting wheels to make one cut in the end. I can’t bend it open without fuddling up the spokes, so I go through two more cutting wheels to make a second cut which allows me to remove the u-bar. Net time - half an hour. The Dremel isn’t cordless, so it’s a lucky thing the cable came apart so easily, so I could move the bike closer to the end of the extension cord. Stealth factor - I think there’s someone two blocks away that didn’t hear the saw, but she heard me swearing everytime the cutting wheels had to be changed.
And yet, some bastard has scored three bikes off my friend Andy’s porch in the dead of the night without waking anybody. Clearly, I am not as smart as a bicycle thief.
bouv Jesus, that’s terrifying! I can only assume that since that article was published in 2004, that they’ve fixed the design since then. My old one was not even a year old. I’ll mess around with the pieces if I get a spare moment.
Kythereia, greatshakes Well, no, he is smart enough to at least lock it to the wrought iron railing of his front balcony. That’s part of what I can’t figure out - how the thieves can pull this off quietly enough that they don’t get caught. In Andy’s case, they’ve done something to the lock and not the railing, which I’d have thought would have been softer.
Dragwyr Maybe, I’ve never had call to use bolt cutters, so I don’t have a pair. Are they quiet?
Anyway, I’m sticking to honest work, since I clearly can’t cut it in the high pressure world of Grand Theft Bicycle IV…
When I worked at a big university, people left bikes all around.
One day I lost my keys, I needed to get home but my bike was locked with a fairly heavy cable. I saw a maintenance guy while I was standing next to the bike. I asked him to help me cut the lock. I expected some kind of ID check. Instead he called another maintenance guy who showed up with a hacksaw. They gleefully cut me loose. No questions asked.
A year or two latter on the same bike rack my bike disappeared.