My theory is that any bike lock is as good as any other. Not because they are all equally difficult to remove, but because you have basically 2 kinds of theives -
1. The opportunist - the guy looking for something not secured that can be easily picked off
2. The Pro - the guy that will get your bike no matter what you put on it because he has the tools to handle anything.

Like many things, the world is full of semi-pros in the middle. On either extreme, you're at the whim of fate. You control your destiny in the middle.

I can't picture myself going for this titanium bow TiGr silly thing. Titanium is very challenging to machine but isn't too much trouble to cut

I'm going to have to take some exception to that second point; titanium may cut relatively easily with the right tools, but that doesn't actually make it any less useful as a bike lock, at least in this case. Try taking an angle grinder to titanium, or watch the video they posted and you'll see why. You'll also see why titanium is used in so many fireworks. Hot titanium glows a rather brilliant white, and would draw quite a bit of attention.

First off I didn't look hard at all, one try and bang there were a bunch of sites not just the one I posted.
Secondly I have a friend who is a locksmith and he agrees that with practice any lock can be picked. They even have lock picking contests with ton of videos on You Tube, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGSwjp1UcnI These contest use tougher and tougher locks as you go up through the ranks

Here's a video of your vaulted Medeco being picked, 6 different ones picked and one bumped: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009...e-lock-picker/

Here a Medeco is picked in record time: http://www.thesidebar.org/insecurity/?p=192 Medeco's are used in contests where a large group of contestants are pitted against their Medeco lock set before them, the clock is started and in 23 seconds the winner opens his, all contestants manage to open theirs too just slower.

Here's another manufactured lock who had claims that they were the toughest to pick, nope, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNPmcs7mV54

And here's a tool designed to pick the Abloy which has the most unusual key and is actually tougher to pick then the Medeco: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8eo1...eature=related

This again is just a few of the sites that show locks being picked.

I'm not saying that the Medeco is easy for the amateur to pick because they will fail, but an experienced person with knowledge of that lock can pick it.

And as Toddles said, if your lock frustrates the wannabe bike thief he'll just remove components and leave your frame behind.

Go ahead and take exception with what you think I said. I just burst a few statements and didn't intend to connect any dots between them.

I would need to try it to really confirm, but the reason I think it is silly is how it stows and how it bows to employ. It's a fine line between clever and stupid*, and I am usually tolerant of that line, but for me it looks like this one came across the line.

We seem to agree that, unlike its weight, titanium is not reknowned as a metal for its exceptional cut resistance. That's all I was saying.

I think it is rather difficult to ignore a thief with an angle grinder working on steel, but folks manage. Sure, some more sparks with titanium. IMHO, shades of grey. BTW, I find the destructive testing video disingenuous comparing the lock's performance to what seems to be a low end walmart special u lock.

This lock might be semi-useful until the novelty of the thing wears off, then it will quickly be a liability and a waste of a lot of titanium.

I'm tuning back to the Medeco smack down. I wonder if there's a fantasy locksmith league?

* credit David St. Hubbins in a conversation with Nigel Tufnel

If you find one I want to be in on the fantasy league.

I could be way off since, as far as I know, there are no stats on this kind of thing, but if I had to guess, I would expect the semi-pros in the middle are a relatively small number. I'm sure it depends on where you live, what neighborhood you're in and all that too. It doesnt really take much to be "pro" enough to defeat any bike lock. A long set of bolt cutters, maybe a battery powered angle grinder, and a pickup truck and you're set.

The only time I had a bike stolen was when I lived in campus housing and had to leave the bike outside chained to the building. A crew came through on thanksgiving day, apparently with giant bolt cutters, and loaded up a truck full of bikes. I doubt any lock would have stopped them. They knew most students would be gone and they brought the tools they needed.

I was UCSB in Santa Barbara when a flatbed pickup truck pulled up to a bike stand with about 15 to 18 bikes locked to it, and four guys got out and picked up the whole rack with all the bikes and took off...in broad daylight!! Fortunately my bike wasn't one of them, but that experience led me to go out and buy a used bike to ride to classes and lock up. But I never had a bike stolen either in 52 years of owning bikes, I am counting my childhood years.

It's called "TOOOL"

Apparently a Medeco can be opened in three minutes; then again, if one of these people is coming after your lock, I don't know if much is safe.

What about a pitbull?

Even these expert lock pickers needed tables, vises, seating and good lighting. And the guy in the Wired video needed 8 minutes per cylinder. It's a whole different world on the street where locks aren't fixed in vises, lighting is bad unless you're working in broad daylight, witnesses abound, police may arrive at any time and you have to sit or lay on the ground.

That's exactly what I meant re semi-pros. Those guys, and rekmeyata's rack attack folk, aren't going to be bumping your Medeco and putting your rotweiller to sleep with a blow dart tipped in rare south american frog venom, but they do come in fully equipped with a few tools to expeditiously handle the situation they plan to handle. They're not rookies, they're certainly a serious threat, but you can effect your destiny to a degree. Don't get me wrong -- you're still going to get stung by the MANY semi-pros. Remember I'm still wearing out my corner of thread responding to pallen's two extremes of the complete opportunist/rookie and the omnipotent Jack Bauer pro where you have no vote in the matter. A goon with a manly pair of bolt cutters is a force to be reckoned with, but you can do some reckoning on the margins by making your bike a less attractive, more inconvenient / risky target. You don't need to run faster than the bear, just the other guy. Many bike thieves are followers of the Josey Wales "A man's got to know his limitations" philosophy; throw some limitations their way and maybe it helps, because there are so many other riper targets out there it is easy for them to move on.

Anyway, I'm arguing silly shades of grey off in a tangent. Usually I come here to get a chuckle out of watching others do that. The laughs are on me this time around.

There in lies the problem, because bike locks have gotten increasingly more difficult to break two weapons have come out, the most effective are the battery powered angle grinders, and picking. A lot of thieves are learning the picking game because it's a lot more stealthy. And lock companies with the warranties have a clause that if the lock shows no sign of visible damage that made the lock fail then you didn't lock properly and the thief just removed an unlocked lock

Alright rekmeyata,
Ask your friend, if right now, I set down a Medeco, can he pick it?

Not can he learn to pick it. But can he do it?

Bank Vaults can be opened! T rated safes can be opened.
Anything can be opened, if the right tools, knowledge and time are used.
NOTHING is secure!

The top .5% of locksmiths will have trouble picking them.
That's why TOOOL uses them for their contests. Because 99.5% of good locksmiths CAN"T open them.!

But you would rather talk about the SMALLEST % that can.

By your thinking NOTHING can be locked up. Nothing can EVER be secured safely, because someone, some where COULD open the lock!

Very strange way of thinking to be. It's correct, yet a little out there.

JR59 your comments don't make sense, all thieves who are wanting to get through locks by picking practice on whatever lock they feel they will encounter, if they encounter one they never practiced on they will buy one and practice on it, locksmiths do similar things, they practice on various locks, usually what is commonly found in the area they service. Let's reverse this and say right now can you jump into a jumbo jet and fly it without practice? Even though you may have experience flying a small one engine Cessna your not going to fly that jumbo jet without practice.

And I never said nothing can ever be locked up, what I said is that no lock can't ever be defeated...two totally different things. I use to lock my bike up all the time in Santa Barbara Ca with nothing more then the thickest cable I could find and a Abus Discus lock for years outside of school and work and never had it stolen, and cables are the easiest to get through. But, as I mentioned, when the flat bed truck incident happened I decided to buy a cheap bike that I wouldn't care if it got stolen and took that to school and sometimes work depending on where I was coming from.

If you live in a high crime area then don't you think it's prudent to protect your self the best you can? Maybe your a billionaire and a lousy $4,000 bike is just chump change then that's fine, but for the average person that's not chump change and neither is $1200, and living in a high crime area it would be wiser to take a $100 bike into risky areas to park.

I live in a nice home in a nice neighborhood, I'm not so paranoid that I have a burglar alarm on the premise, I leave my uncles to protect my home when I'm there, so no alarm on my house and no alarm on my cars. Cars are very easy to break into, and people get stereos stolen all the time even with the alarm blaring away, thus I don't put expensive stereos in my cars, I do at my home though and with no alarm. However I do have a small car collection I store at a friends place who has a huge pole barn that's climate controlled and has an 18 car collection (not including mine) in that barn and it has very sophisticated alarm system...but he paid for it not me! But I only have 3 of my cars there, I have two lessor valued ones at the house. But I don't store those 3 cars there because of the alarm, I store then there because of the climate control, the alarm is just icing on the cake.

Did any of that make sense? Or just a bunch of babble? I don't care if you want to take your $3000 bike and lock it up in a high crime area, that's up to you, I'm just giving advice, and advice can be accepted or rejected, I know if you reject my advice it won't bother me a bit because it's not my bike I going to be worrying about.

I'm not enough of a lock geek to really follow these things to closely, but the article I posted said that the Medeco locks were picked exploiting a security flaw that's been known since 1974. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the company.

Are there really that many lock picking bike thieves? I thought they were more of a brute force, smash & grab crew.

Medeco's response, at least through the view of that several years old Wired article, has been pretty lame. Particularly when you contrast it to the darn impressive public mea culpa and recall by Kryptonite. OTOH, Medeco could in theory be having to look at a problem that is inherent to that kind of lock and exploitable by only a tiny percent of lock Jedi (and a 12 year old girl named Skywalker) vs. having to reengineer and replace decades of product, so maybe the mea vs. culpa ratio in this one is all wacked.

Does anyone know how this has played out over the past few years?

Lock threads = chain lube threads :lol:

If your talking about the amateur drug infested life long criminal, then yes they will attempt to smash and grab, but in some cities, especially NY, you have real pros, and they will use the most advance techniques they can use, and lately picking is slowly coming into vogue because it's very stealthy and because locks are very well today made and the usual "smash and grab" isn't working. However the battery powered angle grinder is still extremely effective, but it's also very noisy and some thieves don't like to attract attention to themselves so those have resorted to picking.