Originally Posted by
bmorey
Here the police encourage you to engrave your driver's licence number under the bottom bracket. The flaw here is you have to be a licensed driver. They occasionally have open days -- you take your bike along to the local cop shop and have it engraved.
This only helps if your bike is recovered by the police which, from the above comments, seems to be unlikely.
And they take the time to run the numbers and if the data base still exists. I am not real keen on having my DL number where it can be easily located. We used to have a nifty
registration system around here back in the 70's and 80's. When you registered they stamped your sticker number into the bottom bracket and you got a nice reflective sticker to put on you seat post along with a brochure of bike laws and rules. Being young an naive at the time...I drank the koolaid. I believe that all but one of my registered bikes was stolen at some point. (still have that frameset BTW) I inquired a few months ago about the fate of the database and no one has a clue if it even still exists. If it does it most likely is in some archaic computer language that is irretrievable. As antedoctal evidence...a friend of mine has his HUGE Schwinn Conti stolen. He saw it at the police sale a couple of years later, the registration sticker was still on it. He had also provided the PD with the serial number at the time it was stolen. He was never contacted about the recovery and was still living at the same address.
What I currently do; is when the bike is torn down for maintenance I put my phone number on slips of paper or scrap plastic and stuff them in the head tube and seat tube. I also engrave them on the seat post and fork steer tube. Never recovered anything that way, but you never know.
Aaron
