First Name: Mr. Last Name: T

I’ve just found this picture by Richard Masoner on Flickr, and had to share it with you:

The picture I have in my head is of Mr T riding up on a tiny little BMX, which he then locks with one of the chains from round his neck. Made me laugh, anyway.

Too Crappy To Steal

This is a brilliant idea – via Bike Hacks. It’s a bunch of ‘rust’ stickers that you can apply to your swish and fast ride to make it look like a pile of junk that’s not worth stealing. Given the intelligence of the average bike thief, you could probably apply these to your full-carbon road bike.

Now, if only someone would make a set of stickers to apply over the top of that nice Campy 11-speed stuff to make it look like a dodgy knock-off . . .

How To LockYourBike[.co.uk] Video

Here’s a great video by Carlton Reid, produced for Northumbria Police. It shows genuine bikes being stolen by genuine thieves, as well as some tip-top advice for how to Lock Your Bike [.co.uk] and avoid this pain yourself:

Read more on Quickrelease.tv’s page for this film, which also features two other excellent videos employing the skills of an extremely good-looking model.

Boris Johnson (@MayorOfLondon) Assassination Attempt!

This is SCARY stuff!

This video comes via Andrea at Velorution. Just watch the truck come bowling along, desperate to overtake the cyclists . . one of whom was Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, who was out scouting routes for a cycling super highway.

I’m with Andrea on this – it’s time for some power to be exercised by the Mayor’s office to stop this sort of mayhem.

Boris is famous as a cyclist for not routinely wearing a helmet (maybe ‘cos it would mess up his hair?). But it looks like yesterday was one of those days when he was lidded up. Who wants to bet with me that some nutter in the press will make an issue of this? I can just see the headlines now . . .

Tousle-Haired Boris, who routinely rides without a helmet,  was lucky to escape when a parked car was dragged into his path by a passing truck

[Tom Vanderbilt - note the passive voice!].

Bah!

Spot The Deliberate Mistake

On the way home tonight, I stopped off to buy some flowers for my Beautiful Wife. Outside the shop I saw this locked up – looks like maybe last year’s model of either the Focus Cayo 105 Tripple, the Cayo Ultegra, or at a push, the Cayo Pro. Whichever it is, it’s between £1,000 and £2,500 of carbon bike.

Which is probably why the owner has locked it with two separate locks – clever person.

Except the locks aren’t used in the ’standard’ configuration. The lock securing the expensive bit of the bike (in fact all of the bike) looks like the sort of thing that my eight year-old daughter could break, while the front wheel is “secured” using a nice chunky D-Lock (or if you prefer, U-Lock):

OK, so how should this have been done?

1. Use the U-lock to secure the back wheel (and if possible the frame too) to something immovable. These are the two most expensive parts of the bike.
2. If you can’t get the lock around the frame and wheel, use the Sheldon Brown method.
3. Use that flimsy-looking cable lock to secure the front wheel (or maybe get a beefier one to do so) – locking it either to the frame or an immovable object.
4. A lock attached to the rim of a wheel like shown above does nothing to prevent it being stolen!

Update – looking at the brifters on the second photo, they seem to be Ultegra, which probably makes this bike the Focus Cayo Ultegra, priced at just shy of £1,500. At that price, when locked like this, it really could be a steal!

Hal Grades Your Locking

I’ve been waiting for a version of this excellent StreetFilms vid to appear on YouTube for a while . . . and here it is. Watch and learn!

Lock ALL Of Your Bike

When I was in That London yesterday, I acted like the worst kind of tourist, photographing pretty much every bike I saw.

Looking at the huge number of bikes locked up to railings, what I generally saw was a sorry tale of half-baked efforts:

Actually, locking every part of the regular parts of a bike that get stolen is the Gold Standard. If you live in a place where dastardly thieving scumbags prowl the streets, it’s something that you probably really do need to aspire to – like the owner of this bike:

Check out these features:

Little tiny U-Lock. No room for a jack in there to bust it open!

Front Wheel Secured With A Cable

Smaller cable running through the rails of the saddle.

This isn’t quite the absolute Gold Standard. But it’s pretty damned good.

Possible improvements?

• That cable is used to secure both the front and rear wheels. Maybe think about putting the U-Lock around the rear wheel’s rim and the seat stays, if it’ll fit?
• Use a different lock for the cable on the front wheel?
• Maybe even permanently lock the cable on the saddle rails to the frame? And while you’re at it, replace the quick release fixing for the seat post with something that actually needs a tool to undo.

But I’m being pedantic. The key thing is that this bike was far better locked than any of the others I saw all day. Given a choice of trying to get something off this bike, or take the whole lot, most thieves are just going to look elsewhere – there are lots of easier pickings!

Carrera Bikes – Are They Honey Traps, @carltonreid ?

One of my Twitter buddies (actually that doesn’t sound too good – can we say correspondant instead?), @carltonreid sent me a couple of photos of Carrera bikes in various states of being badly locked.

First up, there was this one, ’secured’ by the back wheel, using one of those cable locks that your granny’s nail scissors could cut through:

Then a few days later, this one arrived. This time it’s ‘locked’ by the front wheel, using a cable lock that your granny could probably chew through – without bothering to put her false teeth in. Not that she’d bother, because even granny understands about quickrelease fixings:

So then today I came across one, parked up in Byker just outside the local Apple dealer’s den of disappointment (DON’T get me started on this):

So this is just getting too much. Is there some sort of conspiracy? Are Carrera bikes being left lying around as some sort of honey trap to catch bike thieves? I can’t believe that the police would go to such lengths to catch people who aren’t inconveniencing motorists. So maybe it’s that they’re so cheep that there’s no point in locking them really? Then again, starting at £250, they’re not that cheep.

So maybe it’s that their owners either don’t know how to lock them, or are just so disappointed in them that they’re hoping to get them stolen.

Start ‘Em Young

I love this image – taken with my phone’s camera this weekend at Cullercoats beach:

OK, so that’s not much of a lock. But I’m not sure that this is the kind of bike that generally attracts thieving toerags who steal bikes. It’s the principal that’s on display here – you’re never too young to lock your bike up.

Make sure you tell that to your kids!

Sheldon Brown Locking Method: Potential Flaw?

Remember the Sheldon Brown Locking Method? This one:

Well, I thought this article on Commute By Bike showed a potential flaw in Sheldon’s system:

Basically, what the thief’s done is cut every single one of the spokes so they can take the rest of the bike away. Yeah, I know.

However, I’m fairly sure that this is actually the remains of a front wheel. Even with the spokes removed, it’s still not possible to get the wheel rim of a bike through the frame’s rear triangle – not unless you actualy fold the rim up, which hasn’t happened here.

So why would someone go to all this trouble to remove a front wheel rather than just undoing the axle? Who can tell. Maybe the thief had forgotten his spanner (wrench), or maybe the rest of the bikes in the neighbourhood had quickrelease skewers and this one didn’t, and the technology of a hex-nut defeated his intellect. Or maybe it was a really nice bike (that’s a Bontrager tyre after all), with Pinhead Skewers to protect the wheels:

These will prevent someone making off with your wheels. But remember – no lock is completely resistant to being defeated. If someone wants a bike badly enough, they will find a way round.

So in the end, maybe this is another example of the lessons in locking your bike up:

• Lock your bike near to other bikes
• Make sure your bike is better locked than the other bikes
• Make sure your bike doesn’t look as nice / swish / expensive as the other bikes
• Always lock up somewhere very public. Cutting this many spokes takes time, and the thief is less likely to risk that if there’s a bunch of witnesses looking on.