How were they stolen?

thirdcrank
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by thirdcrank »

ben888 wrote:The weakest link in my lock set-up the other day was the cast-iron railing outside my house. [The lock I was using was the £95 Kryptonite M18 D-lock].
Cast iron is brittle and can be broken through with the whack of a hammer, or perhaps the whack of a hammer and chisel. :cry:


Sorry to hear the bad news. I suspect a heavy lock might make an effective hammer.
ben888
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by ben888 »

Vladimir wrote:
ben888 wrote:The weakest link in my lock set-up the other day was the cast-iron railing outside my house. [The lock I was using was the £95 Kryptonite M18 D-lock].
Cast iron is brittle and can be broken through with the whack of a hammer, or perhaps the whack of a hammer and chisel. :cry:


sorry to hear it! is the bike gone?


Thanks. And, yep, sadly.
I heard it happen, sprinted outside and called the police immediately.
They said they'd be at my house within 15 minutes.
I borrowed somebody else's bike while she waited at my house and I had a look round some nearby side streets for the perpetrators and had a look around down the canal. Then went to large nearby park (Shoreditch Park) and spotted it from about 400 yards away with a small bunch of youths around it -- it has v distinctive reflectors on the wheels, which were picked out from a mile away by my 1,900 lumen Exposure light that I had with me.
Phoned the police to tell them where I was and that I was within sight of the thieves.
The police didn't turn up and off went the youths through the back of the park. (Understandably, I couldn't really just stand next to them and say "Hiy'all, I'm just going to hang out with you until the police come.) I tried to work out where they went, and was scooting around Hoxton asking people. One woman said she'd seen them and that they'd offer to sell the bike to her. But anyhow, I lost the trail.
The police turned up at my house 9 hours later...

I'm half-thinking I may have spotted it on Gumtree. But people disagree with my thinking it's the same kind of bike. Easy to become deluded when unbalanced by the whole nastiness of it all.
I'm confident that the bike, based on my frame and repainted or not, is stolen as the chap has posted other bikes as his for sale. And he says nothing about the kind of bike, etc. Dunno.

All so unpleasant.
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horizon
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by horizon »

ben88: that's the kind of information I was hoping for in this thread. It reminds us not only that what the bike is secured has to be secure but also that it may be worthwhile making it unrideable. I know of someone else who saw their cable lock being cut and the thief riding away on their bike (also on railings).
When the pestilence strikes from the East, go far and breathe the cold air deeply. Ignore the sage, stay not indoors. Ho Ri Zon 12th Century Chinese philosopher
Vladimir
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by Vladimir »

horizon wrote:ben88: that's the kind of information I was hoping for in this thread. It reminds us not only that what the bike is secured has to be secure but also that it may be worthwhile making it unrideable. I know of someone else who saw their cable lock being cut and the thief riding away on their bike (also on railings).


Interesting, maybe I will start doing the old "carry your front wheel around with you everywhere you go" trick! The people in the office shouldn't mind; and it will allow me to inspect my front tyre for damage on a daily basis! I already carry my saddle around...

I suppose loosening the cable on the brakes can also be achieved in about 1 min with a bit of practice, but how far do you go with these things?! It already takes me longer than I might think is necessary to lock up my bike and unlock it, as I use two D locks, each with a kryptoflex cable around a wheel...
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horizon
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by horizon »

Vladimir wrote: but how far do you go with these things?! It already takes me longer than I might think is necessary to lock up my bike and unlock it, as I use two D locks, each with a kryptoflex cable around a wheel...


We can take this further and imagine having to remove all removeable fixtures (bottles, computer, lights, pump, panniers, saddle etc). This problem of the bike being vulnerable in the open is beyond the ken of most "Bike parking" providers. The best bike security involves supervision, cover and a lock - i.e. indoors. The idea of leaving something valuable locked to a lampost is risible.

I'm reminded of staying at various hotels and B&Bs where the room door (which presents no risk at all) is heavily secured while the bike is expected to remain propped up against the wall outside.
When the pestilence strikes from the East, go far and breathe the cold air deeply. Ignore the sage, stay not indoors. Ho Ri Zon 12th Century Chinese philosopher
Vladimir
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by Vladimir »

horizon wrote:
Vladimir wrote: but how far do you go with these things?! It already takes me longer than I might think is necessary to lock up my bike and unlock it, as I use two D locks, each with a kryptoflex cable around a wheel...


We can take this further and imagine having to remove all removeable fixtures (bottles, computer, lights, pump, panniers, saddle etc). This problem of the bike being vulnerable in the open is beyond the ken of most "Bike parking" providers. The best bike security involves supervision, cover and a lock - i.e. indoors. The idea of leaving something valuable locked to a lampost is risible.

I'm reminded of staying at various hotels and B&Bs where the room door (which presents no risk at all) is heavily secured while the bike is expected to remain propped up against the wall outside.


I already remove my panniers and saddle, as well as lights. in fact, the lights reside in my pannier until they are needed.

The only things they might be able to steal is the rack (@£30) (sometimes the kryptoflex does not go through the rack if Im not careful), the mudugards (@£30), the QL3 mounting system (@£15), the light mounting fixings (@£6), the rotors (@£10) and brake callipers (@£100 a pair) and levers (@£50 a pair). If they did steal all of that, it would come to about £291!!! (or, if I'm over pricing slightly, surely the whole lot would cost £200 to replace at least!)

and the kicker is... I am quite certain that my insurance provider (cycle guard) does not cover any of these "accesories" against theft...

I still leave them behind, I'm not exactly going to remove my brakes, rack, mudguards, etc every day...
ben888
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by ben888 »

horizon wrote:ben88: that's the kind of information I was hoping for in this thread. It reminds us not only that what the bike is secured has to be secure but also that it may be worthwhile making it unrideable. I know of someone else who saw their cable lock being cut and the thief riding away on their bike (also on railings).


Yep. I know that many people may say this, but it's really true that 95% of the time I will have the lock going through the wheel (or both) rather than just the frame. It's really important and it was idiotic of me not to. I wasn't going to leave it out for any length of time. And usually I'm the very exemplar of good locking practice -- just not this one time :cry:

So while I'm appearing hypocritical:

-- I'll normally avoid cast-iron railings. Jeez, I'm an idiot on this occasion, but however.
-- I usually make sure that my D-lock [and I'd never bother with any D-lock under about £60 -- if you use Evans's and Cycle Surgery's price match, you'll get a £90 lock for about £45] is going through the back wheel. And I'll put a cheaper lock on the front.
-- If possible, I'll have the front lock attached to another secure point rather than just to the bike itself. This prevents twisting attacks.
-- My feeling is that the hassle of taking front wheel off just isn't worth it. Same with saddle -- I think Pitlocks are really grand, albeit expensive.
-- In terms of being impossible to ride, people at the LFGSS website seem to recommend putting a motorbike-style disc lock on. It's worth looking at their discussions, but I think it's overkill for the kind of bike I ride -- about £600 worth, including fittings.
-- There's the story of the two boy scouts who are camping in the woods when they hear a bear. One starts putting on his trainers, and the other says "Why are you doing that? Everybody knows it's not possible to outrun a bear." And the first one's response is: "I don't need to outrun the bear -- I just need to outrun you." My view is that locks are the same. As we all know, any lock can be defeated. But it's a matter of the defeatability of your locking set-up versus that of others with a similarly valuable bike. I reckon that a top-end Kryptonite on the frame and back wheel and something like an Evolution Mini on the back [the two will cost about £100] and Pitlocks for seat tube (and you can use superglue and ballbearings for saddle itself) is ample for a £500 or so bike in London. ***Just don't be an idiot like me and lock to a cast-iron railing ever. Jeez.... :oops: *** I don't know anybody with that kind of set-up who's fallen victim to bike theft. But I do know several people who've had £350 - £450 range bikes nicked that have £35 locks.
-- A decent lock is pretty heavy, and one thing I do is leave them at various different places. One at the gym, one at the library etc. It can seem a lot of money to spend if you're buying 3 or 4 £60 Kryptonite locks, but I reckon it's really worth it. The M18 Kryptonite (£100 from Evans but available for about £55 using price match) weighs over 2kg, I think. The difference in cost between a racer weighing xkg and one weighing x-2kg is really substantial, and it always strikes me as silly when I see commuters lugging these things around on their pricey bikes.

Anyhow, I've had a number of bikes stolen over the years. But never when I've followed the above thinking.
[Which I failed to do the other night... :oops: :cry: ]
ben888
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by ben888 »

Vladimir wrote:
horizon wrote:
Vladimir wrote: but how far do you go with these things?! It already takes me longer than I might think is necessary to lock up my bike and unlock it, as I use two D locks, each with a kryptoflex cable around a wheel...


We can take this further and imagine having to remove all removeable fixtures (bottles, computer, lights, pump, panniers, saddle etc). This problem of the bike being vulnerable in the open is beyond the ken of most "Bike parking" providers. The best bike security involves supervision, cover and a lock - i.e. indoors. The idea of leaving something valuable locked to a lampost is risible.

I'm reminded of staying at various hotels and B&Bs where the room door (which presents no risk at all) is heavily secured while the bike is expected to remain propped up against the wall outside.


I already remove my panniers and saddle, as well as lights. in fact, the lights reside in my pannier until they are needed.

The only things they might be able to steal is the rack (@£30) (sometimes the kryptoflex does not go through the rack if Im not careful), the mudugards (@£30), the QL3 mounting system (@£15), the light mounting fixings (@£6), the rotors (@£10) and brake callipers (@£100 a pair) and levers (@£50 a pair). If they did steal all of that, it would come to about £291!!! (or, if I'm over pricing slightly, surely the whole lot would cost £200 to replace at least!)

and the kicker is... I am quite certain that my insurance provider (cycle guard) does not cover any of these "accesories" against theft...

I still leave them behind, I'm not exactly going to remove my brakes, rack, mudguards, etc every day...


I've heard that Exposure light brackets are being nicked these days. They cost about £25. What's galling about this is the knowledge that the end user of the stolen item (or, indeed, the thieves themselves) are "real" cyclists, rather than teenaged pr*cks, since the latter won't be spending £150-plus on an Exposure light.
My rear light is worth a packet [a Hope District] so of course I take that off, but I know people who have always left their little lights on and they've never been nicked. Which makes me think sometimes of buying a number of the cheapie lights [say for £3 each from [the absolutely amazing, but slow-to-deliver] dealextreme.com with the expectation that one may be nicked every, say, eight weeks. That might be worth avoiding the nuisance of taking the light off every time.
Maybe that's a bad example. But I do sometimes wonder whether it's better to use a £10 pannier from Argos and have it constantly Kryptoflexed to the rack versus having a £120 Ortlieb pannier that one takes off whether it's got something in it or not.
Surprising how long the basket lasts in this: http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/one-yea ... treet.html
ben888
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by ben888 »

Vladimir wrote:
misterbenn wrote:I'd say that if the bike is going to be left for more than 1 hour then a solid lock is a must! And for bikes left for over 4 hours i'd say two solid locks are a must, one for front wheel and one for frame/back wheel.


At first I was puzzled at these seemingly arbitrary time limits and locks to be used. Then it dawned on me that statistically, leaving the bike locked with a bad lock (or even unlocked) for a few minutes is likely to be safe, due to the limited exposure to thieving eyes, and the longer you leave it, the greater the exposure; it's all risk and statistics, which I have nothing against as a concept. However, statistics mean nothing to the individual, and a bike can be stolen in less than a minute, even breaking a sold secure silver lock, so really; you might as well lock your bike properly every single time, a tooled up thief could be anywhere...

For me it would have to be more like: If left for longer then 6 minutes, a solid lock is a must, and if left for longer than 30 minutes, two solid locks are a must.


I'm posting too much, but my rough thoughts on this are:
-- Anything less than 5 minutes, a token-ish something is OK.
-- Anything more than 5 minutes, you want the full monty. At least in London. There are thieves at the ready almost everywhere; it's astonishing.
The thing is, that if you're really rigid about this it in a way makes it easier -- you're never having the debate with yourself about whether to lock at level A or level B or whatever. Similarly, if I pop into a newsagent in some rural idyll to pick up a can of coke for 30 seconds, I will *always* lock up. Of course it's almost certainly unnecessary. But it means that I'm never debating elsewhere whether I need to lock up or not. And I know that I'll never let the standard slip out of laziness and later kick myself.
It reminds me of the problem of drivers who sometimes don't indicate. Indicating is really very easy. And the easiest way to always indicate when you need to is just to always indicate whenever you need to or not. So if driving on a solitary country road and pulling over with nobody about, always still indicate. And then you'll never use any excess mental RAM asking yourself at other times "do I need to indicate?". Or something. Locking strikes me as similar. But I need to get out more... (The peril of being temporarily bikeless.)
jugglingphil
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by jugglingphil »

Recently had my bike stolen from bike stands in city centre of Nottingham. Bike was locked with a cable lock.
No bike or lock so can only assume that they broke lock and took it with them.
I've since found out that this is a common spot for thefts in the city, shame that there are no signs warning cyclists or cctv to catch the crook(s).
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[XAP]Bob
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by [XAP]Bob »

Maybe we need to go down the route of steering locks and crank locks...
A decent padlock around a crank and chainstay should be quite effective - particularly on a fixie.
A shortcut has to be a challenge, otherwise it would just be the way. No situation is so dire that panic cannot make it worse.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those can extrapolate from incomplete data.
Mark1978
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by Mark1978 »

I did once arrive at a shop where I needed to pop in for literally 60 seconds. I didn't have my lock, so I loosened the stem bolts, anyone trying to ride it away would have crashed pretty quickly. Wouldn't have stopped a man with a van by any means.
zee

Re: How were they stolen?

Post by zee »

ben888 wrote:It reminds me of the problem of drivers who sometimes don't indicate. Indicating is really very easy. And the easiest way to always indicate when you need to is just to always indicate whenever you need to or not. So if driving on a solitary country road and pulling over with nobody about, always still indicate. And then you'll never use any excess mental RAM asking yourself at other times "do I need to indicate?". Or something. Locking strikes me as similar. But I need to get out more... (The peril of being temporarily bikeless.)


^^ This.

I am sick of drivers not indicating their turn which happens all the time in London. Either that annoyingly slows me down as I am unsure about moving forward, or it creates some of the most dangerous situations.
Mark1978
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by Mark1978 »

zee wrote:
ben888 wrote:It reminds me of the problem of drivers who sometimes don't indicate. Indicating is really very easy. And the easiest way to always indicate when you need to is just to always indicate whenever you need to or not. So if driving on a solitary country road and pulling over with nobody about, always still indicate. And then you'll never use any excess mental RAM asking yourself at other times "do I need to indicate?". Or something. Locking strikes me as similar. But I need to get out more... (The peril of being temporarily bikeless.)


^^ This.

I am sick of drivers not indicating their turn which happens all the time in London. Either that annoyingly slows me down as I am unsure about moving forward, or it creates some of the most dangerous situations.


Probably because of some of the daft advanced driving advice which says you shouldn't indicate if there's nobody there to benefit from seeing it. Which is crazy because you can't always tell who is there and who is going to benefit, so you should signal everything regardless. Different on a bike of course as signalling destablises you a bit so you don't want to do it unless you have to.
Grumpyoldbiker
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Re: How were they stolen?

Post by Grumpyoldbiker »

I've never had a bike stolen in the street or away from home, but I did have three stolen in two incidents which occurred in quick succession from my house a few years back. It might be helpful to share my experiences. On the first occasion a "cyclist" came to our house and asked if he could borrow a cycle pump. I loaned him the pump and we chatted for about half an hour about cycling, bikes, security, etc during which time he cleverly extracted all the information anyone would need to come back that night and steal my bike and my wife's from our garden shed. The garden shed had a big padlock, but he simply removed all the screws from the hopeless hinges screwed to the outside of the shed door. We got replacement bikes on our insurance a few weeks later, and I decided to keep these in the house in the basement. I locked one of them, the more expensive one, the other I left unlocked. At that time I always left my bunch of keys on my hall stand about 4-5 feet from the front door, which had a conventional letterbox. I woke up in the night to hear noises downstairs, which I ignored initially, thinking it was my kids going to the loo, eventually I heard the sound of the front door closing. Unfortunately I was too late to catch the thief who had managed to make off with one of the new bikes, the one that was not padlocked, and one of our rucsacs filled with all the CDs, small valuables he could find. The thief had attempted to hacksaw through the lock on the more expensive bike, but had stopped part way through, probably due to the noise it made. The Police were certain that the thief was the same person on both occasions, and that it was the person who had borrowed the pump, they also explained that thieves use bamboo canes with hooks to get keys through letterboxes, and that was probably how the thief got into the house on the second occasion. I don't want to suggest that you will always get a return visit from a thief, but it does happen. It also shows that locking your bike, even when at home, can help. So some of the lessons for me were:
1. Always lock your bike(s) even at home.
2. Never leave your keys in your hall, especially where they can be seen and "fished" from your letterbox. (have them beside your bed so you can get out in the event of a fire)
3. Be wary of anyone who calls at your door however innocent they may seem.
4. Don't leave anything valuable in an insecure shed.
I can look back on these events in a relaxed way now, but I did not sleep properly for about two years after the second incident. On the funny side the interview with the Police after the first theft was a priceless piece of comedy, which ended something like this:
"So Mr Grumpy, just to confirm, are you saying that a person you didn't know called at your house and you told this individual what type of bike you had, and where it was stored, and that you never bothered locking it?" (Followed by a look that can only be described as "what a mug")

Bye, just off to lock my bikes........
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