Singlespeed & Fixed Gear - Your stolen bike

Tell your best (and by best I mean worst) story of having a bike stolen. I mean the newest, most expensive, or most sentimental machine you've had ripped off and under what circumstances. I recently had one of mine stolen and I would feel better to know what kind of heartbreak others have suffered. Later we can all decide who's suffered the most.

i've only had one bike stolen and it was a cheap department store mountain bike that cost $75 new. that actually made it more maddening. who would bother to cut a u-lock for that?

all i know was it sucked walking out of the movie, getting ready to ride home, and there was no bike. i looked around like an idiot before i realized that someone took it. i wish them a horrible death.

bike stealing is bad, but after seeing "the bicycle thief", i now think it's really sad, too.

that movie's sad as ****.

my custom celmins road bike, the one i won the bulk of my races on, was stolen from the basement of my work where i had it locked up.

i LOVED that bike like no other, and the worst part was it's irreplaceable; i had to beg him to come out of retirement to build it, and he hasn't built another one since.

Yeah, that was my favorite part of having my ride stolen- walking around by the bike rack like an idiot for a few minutes wondering, "Where the h*ll did i leave that thing?" I just had the sensation the whole time that the guy who stole it was watching from somewhere laughing. I'd murder him.

my custom celmins road bike, the one i won the bulk of my races on, was stolen from the basement of my work where i had it locked up.

i LOVED that bike like no other, and the worst part was it's irreplaceable; i had to beg him to come out of retirement to build it, and he hasn't built another one since.


wow....that is awful.

House broken into. Dog poisoned. My custom built mountain bike....my Dura-Ace road bike....my roommates 2 mountain bikes. And they smashed the cedar strip canoe one of my roommates was building. All told about $25,000 in property lost and damage.

bike stealing is bad, but after seeing "the bicycle thief", i now think it's really sad, too.

that movie's sad as ****.

Good point. That was a great film indeed. Highly recommended.

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=136852

Bruno almost made me cry at the end..... italian neo-realism is the ultra-sad.

not exactly a stolen bike story, but might make you laugh.


So when I was like 13 I was really into BMX, and there was this BMX parkish thing in Scituate (South shore of massachusetts). Just a bunch of dirt jumps that people made. One night at like 2 am i decided I really, really wanted to ride. My bike was in the back of my parents car, so I grabbed it and I went out.

Around like 3:30 I get this spot light shined on me and a cop asked me what I was doing, ridiculous. I explained to him I was riding, since I was 13 he wanted me to go with him, so I put my bike in his cruiser and got in. He took me to the station, had me leave my bike in the garage of the station then dropped me off.

The next morning I was woken up by my parents and they were like someone stole your bike out of our car! I was like what the ****, they were like we called the cops. The cop showed up at the door bike in hand and they were like....what the ****...to say the least I was grounded.

Not that that really has any relevance, but I thought it was funny.

House broken into. Dog poisoned. My custom built mountain bike....my Dura-Ace road bike....my roommates 2 mountain bikes. And they smashed the cedar strip canoe one of my roommates was building. All told about $25,000 in property lost and damage.

Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. Good thing no one was killed. Sorry about the poor mutt man; that's really cold-blooded.

damn cavernmech. sorry to hear that.

Dog poisoned.

that's way too wrong.

i had the frame i bought with my disability payments from breaking my arm in the trunk of my friends car, and the car got stolen while eating breakfast on my birthday. They found the car a week later though and the frame was still there. Its the stan miles in my sig.

wow, that'd be a ****ty bike to lose, 128.

cavernmech...yeah...wow...bike stolen...dog poisoned...that's cruel. was the culprit drawn and quartered? please say yes.

yea i was in a pretty foul mood the week it was awol. :( Hope they caught the guy who did that **** to cavernmech...

I had an all-chrome Haro BMX in high school. I left it locked to a handrail in the most populous area of the school for a few hours. When I returned, the seat, post, pedals, CRANKS (ashtabula-style crap!), bar/stem/lever and fork were gone.

I was heartbroken as it was my only form of transportation besides the crucially flawed bus system in the area (Santa Cruz). I just sat there for a while imagining the scene as a little crew stripped piece by piece off my crappy mass-market bike in full view of a quad full of students.

Eyewitnesses told me, "oh yeah, sorry man, I didn't wanna say nothin' 'cause those guys were some hard-ass gangbangers..". Thanks, guys. I wonder what the faculty's excuse was.

Hard-ass gangbangers carry crank pullers?

Cavernmech, sorry to hear of your loss, did your dog survive? That's the saddest story yet. I'd rather lose all my bikes than my dog.

Once as a teen, I was working the last shift in a dart booth at our church fair. We were collecting cash and I noticed my partner was pocketing some! When our shift was over this loser went out behind the booth to get his bike but it was gone! I loved it. Probably the most fitting stolen bike story.

I had someone try to steal my bike once. it was u-locked through the front wheel & downtube to a bike rack. the wannabe thief thought they could break the lock by pulling on the rear wheel & using the bike as leverage. instead they bent the entire bike into a semi-circle.

Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. Good thing no one was killed. Sorry about the poor mutt man; that's really cold-blooded.

Unless I'm mistaken it sounds like his dog was killed.

Hard-ass gangbangers carry crank pullers?

Nah, these were one-piece cast bmx jobbies. One of the "highlights" of the design is you can pull 'em apart with just a big adjustable wrench. The crank and bottom bracket spindle are one piece, they just come right out when you remove the bb cups.

this is back in houston tejas, anyways in my neighborhood it was all high-class, large boulevards, friendly po-lice and the like. So, i bike to school, leaving my garage door open 'cause im a 12 year old with no attention span, and when i get back home later on in the day, my grandma (who sat at home all day) asked me why our worker was cleaning out the garage, of course i was clueless, our worker had a broken leg and wouldnt be working for a while.

i look outside and find some ******* emptying our garage of everything (including non-valuables like cleaning supplies) including my dads pricey/priceless gold bianchi dual suspension mountainbike....i think it was one of the first they made

sure enough, called the cops and he got arrested in our back yard.....too bad i still got grounded for leaving the effing door open

not so sad....i wanted to kill him though

I've only ever had a bike stolen once. I was in 6th grade or so and had a really bright neon yellow Huffy 10 speed that I used to tear around the neighborhood on. I would frequently ride it 1/10 mile from my house to the bus stop in the morning to save walking time (I've always been a perpetually late person and probably always will be). At the bus stop, I would stash the bike in the woods next to the road and ride it back home in the afternoon.

I started to leave it for a few days when I got a ride home or something and didn't feel like going out to get it. One time I left it there for a week or two and when I looked for it next, it was gone. This was probably fall, so the foliage was thinning out and the bike could be seen from the road if you looked carefully. I guess someone decided the bike was abandoned for long enough and liberated it for me. Not a huge loss, since it was just a hardware store Huffy and I was riding it less and less for whatever reason, but it was a bit difficult to explain to my parents.

You guys have all got me beat. Now that I have a bike I've put some money into (fixed road conversion with new wheelset, drivetrain, cranks, bars, etc.) I picked up a Kryptonite evoluton mini U lock and try to lock it up outside as little as is reasonably possible. It comes up to my cube with me at work, hides in the back of the photo department at school, and stays in the basement or front hallway at home. I even lock it to my bike rack if I leave it racked up on the car for any amount of time in public.

- could someone please steal my 15.5-inch Marin comfort bike? my LBS sold me a too-small bike and the only way i can replace it is to have it removed from my possession...

- tks in advance... i'll leave it unchained outside my local supermarket...

:-)

The best bike I ever had stolen from me was my Stumpjumper. It had Race face parts, and for sentimental value, OMG, it was like lsing my best friend. I was outside of the main branch of the Vancouver Library, and only ran in to drop my books off and run out. I had two u-locks on it. I come out, see no bike, think "ok...". Run around to the other side, faintly thinking that I may have parked it on the other side. Nope. Not only that, (s)he took both the locks too. Why take the friggin' locks? Plus, to top it all off, I had no money, so i had to jump the Skytrain. Guess who gets a ticket? Yours truly. Quite simply, one of the worst days of my life. :mad:

when i was nine i had a huffy mudslinger that i thought the world of, one sunny sunday i was riding around the neighborhood when a gentleman in a USA dream team jersey decides he would like my bike so he tells me to "get off the ****ing bike" i try to explain that it was a recent birthday present and that i loved it the gentleman didn't care for my story so he beat the crap out of me and took the bike, my neighbor came out of his house and tried to chase the guy but it was no use, i was sore, my wallet was in the frame bag so i was also out of 20 dollars and as a nine year old 20 dollars is a ton of money, to add insult to injury my parents decided the neighborhood was becoming unsafe and we moved to a much smaller house in the suburbs that noone in my family liked, we lived there miserably until they could afford a house they liked, in this hideous small house my family practically fell apart, my parents fought constantly, my siblings and i didn't speak to eachother and the neighbors were what i consider typical suburbanites and therefore never talked to us or eachother, so it was the most miserable 6 years of my family's life, to this day i somewhat blame myself for getting jumped

...when a gentleman in a USA dream team jersey...

- i assume you use the term 'gentleman' loosely?

holy ****, that's a traumatic story.

dudes shouldn't be beating up 9 year old kids anyway. what a ****ing ******.

when i was a really little kid, i was riding around the alice in wonderland boat pond in central park on some little huffy WITH TRAINING WHEELS. 3 kids--none of whom could have been younger than 13, mugged me for my ride. i just cried. it was one of only two rides i had on that bike and didn't get another one for years.

last year, riding around central park late one night, up by the great hill on the north side of the park, 3 kids chased me to try to jack me for one of my track bikes. i just laughed and dodged them as they jumped out in front of me and came huffing and puffing from behind.

but yeah, what is it with central park?

man soyboy how many years of therapy did it take before you could ride a bike again

i had my bike stolen like 6 months ago. im pretty sure my roomate or his girlfriend left the back door unlocked, since it was open the next morning, but im not really sure, and he insists he closed it. i decided not to press the issue to try not to destroy our friendship. a conversion with about $600 put into it.

The only bike I ever had stolen was my Knight Rider Big Wheels bike----it was my favorite bike as a kid---it was all black (very ghetto looking) with an integrated handlebar, stem, and headset. It had a cool skid lever on the right side. I won all the skidding competitions. I used to love riding backwards circles. All of my non-bike friends worshipped it---the kids on scooters called me a hipster.

I went to a pool party a few blocks over and left it on the front lawn. I forgot my ulock and after i returned from tormenting all the girls while all hopped up on mountain dew i kept looking around the front yard but alas it was nowhere to be seen. I had to stand on the back of my best friend's bike to get home. I cried all night.

I miss you Kit.

i've got an old beater univega that i built up for trips to the grocery store/pharmacy/etc. it's a nice bike for a beater, but since it was a beater i never really took it that seriously. one night i made a trip to get some food and was then gonna go back out to grab a six pack afterwards. i got home, tossed the bike on my front porch, and went inside to unload the food into the fridge. get back outside and the bike is gone. i didn't even bother calling the cops because i figured i'd never see it again.

3 or 4 days later i see some old crackhead stumbling around on it while i'm walking to work. i break into ninja mode and follow him to his house. lo and behold, he did the exact same thing i did, throw it on the front porch without locking it. i sneak up to the porch and steal it back. i wish it was always this easy.

well i never stopped ridding, i did chores for neighbors until we moved and bought a new bike as soon as we had moved, it was a ****ty ralleye(not raleigh) mountain bike, it was yellow and had black flecks on it, i rode it for years until it was totallyed in my first bike car collision, an old man ran a red light and hit me, he lost his license, from there imoved onto a single speed cruiser, from there it was my old schwinn world sport and from there to my first fix, there's the whole story

I, (thinking, not without reason that nobody COULD steal it) left my talltandem in my backyard unlocked. It had a flat tire. It weighed about 75 pounds or so (four Varsities). It rode wonderfully, solo or with a stoker.


The (slightly) amusing thing about this is that it turned up at the scrapyard a few months later and my friends at Working Bikes bought it off a scrapper for $5. I got it back, but it was wrecked beyond repair. My landlord threw it out one day while I was at work.


I suppose I should build another one.

I, (thinking, not without reason that nobody COULD steal it) left my talltandem in my backyard unlocked. It had a flat tire. It weighed about 75 pounds or so (four Varsities). It rode wonderfully, solo or with a stoker.


The (slightly) amusing thing about this is that it turned up at the scrapyard a few months later and my friends at Working Bikes bought it off a scrapper for $5. I got it back, but it was wrecked beyond repair. My landlord threw it out one day while I was at work.


I suppose I should build another one.

what's with people stealing tallbikes? a local shop had one of their tallbikes stolen and so did one of my friends.

what's with people stealing tallbikes? a local shop had one of their tallbikes stolen and so did one of my friends.


Mine was not the first stolen tallbike in Chicago, nor the last.

My next-door neighbor (who has a desk job and wears MUCH fancier clothes than I do) rides his tallbike to work every day and leaves it parked outside his building. He's in his mid-thirties. His first tallbike was stolen by a kid who wanted to try riding it. I think he got doored on the bike that was stolen shortly before it happened.

http://dankorn.com/


His new bike, as you can see, is the H2. It's pretty sweet. He really does ride it every day, rain, shine, snow, whatver. It's really awesome.

Sigh. I've had 3 bikes stolen... simultaneously.

I was working at a shop in Washington, DC (Proteus, for whom Yamaguchi built in the late 70s/early 80s) where I was able to buy a Cannondale R500 and a Bridgestone MB-2 on my employee discount. Both bikes, along with my childhood Kuwahara Exhibitionist freestyle bike were stolen from my garage (locked.) Took me another year to save enough to buy another bike...

Sigh. I really, really wish I still had that Bridgestone. The Cannondale was tricked out with Zeus hubs on Fiamme Red Label tubulars built by one of the old grumpy shop folks. Great wheels...

Bike theft #1: I was 8 yrs old and usually just rode around the block on the sidewalk. One summer night, a neighbor about 3 yrs. older than me wanted to switch bikes. He had an Apollo 3 speed and I had a Ross Polo Bike. We rode around the block and got jumped by two kids, one riding and the other standing on pegs. The kid on pegs made right for me, told me to get the **** off the bike and punched me in the face. I fell off and he took full speed off on my neighbor's bike. It was a nice bike, but the shifter didn't work and neither did the brakes. Needless to say, my neighbor was pissed.

Bike theft #2: When I was in college, my 40 lb rigid no-name 10 sp mtb was stolen out of my locked garage. Thief broke in through the window, took the bike and opened the door from the inside. There went my messenger career. A few years later when I finally had some money, I bought the bike I ride now.

I have had my custon rhygin cyclocross bike stolen 2 times.
Its a bigbike (60cm x 60cm) so I am asuming it was hard to ride.
Both times the bike was found in the east river.
Thank goodness it is made of stainless steel and wont rust.
The insurance company paid me full price for it both times and when it was found I bought it back for 20 percent of the payment.
I still ride it as my winter fixie.

I bought 20 bikes from propertyroom.com for $30 (plus another $150 for shipping so $180 total), but I didn't really have space for them in my apartment complex. So while I squeezed as many as I could into my building's bike rooms, the rest had to go onto the street.

I used some cheap cable locks to lock 3 of them to one signpost, and 3 to another. Gone within a week.

Didn't really care though, I left the worst ones outside and the best ones in my bike room. Even thought "best" is used loosely in this regard, as all the bikes were absolute crap.

when I was around 14 or 15 a kid stole my 10 speed Magna. he lived right around the other side of the block, and was running sort of a pseudo-chop-shop. Later that day, my brother and I went to his house, beat the crap out of him, and got my bike back. A week later he threw a rock through our window. My brother and I chased him down (on our bikes) and once again, beat the crap out of him.
some people need to be beaten to learn I guess.

hahahaha wow, my first bike stolen was when i was in 7th grade it was a yellow Haro Cozmo it was my first BMX bike i left it outside on a bike rack before a dance with all my friens ad there were probably 5-10 bikes on it and none were locked he just happened to like mine. somone said they saw it behind a dumpster the next day because it was the only bright yellow bike in maine...he ruined my rear wheel i knew the kid that did it and we got money from him so its all good....now i sold it to my boss for $10. and i have a new bright yellow bike yay.

The only thing bike related that has been stolen were my wheels...

but i recovered them and you can read about it here:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12277246&postID=112386923112260024
(click on "show original post")

my custom celmins road bike, the one i won the bulk of my races on, was stolen from the basement of my work where i had it locked up.

i LOVED that bike like no other, and the worst part was it's irreplaceable; i had to beg him to come out of retirement to build it, and he hasn't built another one since.
that suck's.
really g.d. bad that sucks.

The only thing bike related that has been stolen were my wheels...

but i recovered them and you can read about it here:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12277246&postID=112386923112260024
(click on "show original post")

Cool story. I'm glad you recovered the wheels. I'll kill the guy that steals my wheels. Don't even think about messing with my wheels.

fbm angel of death brand new prototype profile tapered fork, profile ss cranks, brand new as in two days old, left hand drive ss rear hub and ss front hub laced to big cities. profile bars, profile prototype bottom bracket. white trash kids in my neighborhood jacked up my garage door with a car jack and stole it. im sure it currently has handlebars at a 120 degree angle, pegs on the rear only, a kid is probably looping a wheelie out right now, most likely has a mole wrench or a crescent wrench as a seat post clamp, no grips, or the bar ends protruding out the rip out bar ends, and im sure the brake is no longer faced in making it squeal like a banshee everytime its brakes are locked up at the 7/11. i guess none of this probably means anything unless you ride/rode bmx...but it crushed me. like i literally cried. and i was a 24 year old man. crying over a bike. i love my track bike and i loved it then but that bike wont ever be replaced.

I was having problems with my landlord once. I had to chase him away with a shot gun on one occasion. Anyway the whole mess ended up in court and while we were in court the bastard had someone break into my apartment and steal my bike. When I got home from court my bike was gone and I know he did it because I remember the smirky smile on his face when he looked at me. I still owe the mutha one and that was 15 years ago.

I had a mountain bike stolen about a year ago from outside of my part-time job. I now think that the thief actually did me a favor because I had cracked the frame at the seatpost and got a flat on the way to work that night. Basically, they took a broken bike from me. I really only miss the saddle.

Never had anything super-valuable of mine stolen (well, five hundred bucks out of my room last summer), but I'll throw in another facet to this (http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=175544&highlight=pawn) story...

So first time, bike gets stolen. Couple months later, appears at a pawn shop. Owner goes to cops, but has no serial number, so the cops think he's bull****ting. When they ask him the value of the bike--about 2400-- they think he's trying to take everyone for a ride and he almost gets arrested.

Bike disappears from pawn shop a couple days later.