Do you carry a lock?
 

I'm thinking of doing the Empire State Trail from Buffalo to NYC this summer, and just getting details together again and it occurred to me that I never gave any thought to carrying a lock. I tend not to carry one when I ride because I'm usually just out to ride, not to shop or eat. But on a long road trip, especially a solo one, I know I'll need to make stops. Overnights won't be a problem as I'm staying in hotels, and I'd drop the bike at the hotel for dinner, although I might need it for transportation to get to dinner. I have this picture in my head that I'll be staying in the small towns along the way and be able to walk to some local place, but my experience in car trips is different. The hotel is near some highway interchange and the restaurants are further down the road, even in small towns.

Anyway, do you all carry locks, and if you do, what kind? As a New Yorker I have a Kryptonite U-lock for the frame and a cable that loops through the wheels. It is heavy and I avoid carrying it.

Absolutely. I use a cable lock to stop the opportunist thief. Anyone who really wants to steal a bike won't be stopped by most, if not all, locks so it is to deter the casual thief.

With a cable/chain lock, I would also consider an audible alarm. They don't cost much

For a quick trip into a grocery store or a restaurant, I just use a skier type lock, very fast and very light. In restaurants, I try to find a seat where I can see my bike. Skier lock below, tiny, easy to use, retractable cable makes it very convenient.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...61df1b26d3.jpg

Also bring a cable lock for when I am in campgrounds, or in areas where I worry more about theft. A skier lock will only slow a thief by less than a minute, the cable lock is less convenient to use, but it slows a thief for several minutes.

I figure opportunistic theft is about all I can deter, basically slow them down. I use the velcro on brake level trick to lock the brakes, this makes the hop & ride type of theft take a little longer and awkward.

The answer to your questions are yes and yes. Yes, I carry a cable lock. Yes, you should too. I like the ski lock above because it stops almost any unprepared thief and it is lighter and more convenient than my cable lock. I have been using the same Masterlock cable lock for almost 40 years. I know it can be shimmed with a bit of soda can or clipped with a cable cutter, but i think it stops a lot of less prepared thieves. Because the plastic coating on mine is starting to crack, I'm slowly getting into the market for a new lock.

I would suggest carrying a thin cable lock all the time, It can be handy in a lot of ways. I've even used mine to tie my rear rack in place and get home as well as to secure cargo in place in a pinch.

Cable lock is cheap and easy; you can lock the bike up to something so it's not vulnerable to snatch-and-run with a pickup truck to haul it off.

Just having a visible lock is often enough to deter casual theft. That's about all that's reasonable.

I'll have to find a lighter lock then. What I have is pretty heavy duty. But yea, I only need it to stop an opportunistic thief. Even my Kryptonite NYC Fuhgeddaboudit was broken. I had bike parking inside in my office, but they didn't want locks left on the rack so I'd leave the lock outside locked to a public rack. I did it for years. One day I ride up to get my my lock and it was gone. It just showed me how any lock can be broken. My guess is that someone decided to clean up all the dead locks because mine wasn't the only one on the block. Some of them looked like they hadn't been touched in years. Anyway, I bought a new somewhat lighter one since I had to carry it with me now, but it is still heavier than I want to carry 500 miles.

+1. Whether I actually use it depends on the situation. If I’m on the boardwalk in Ocean City, NJ and stop for some fudge to bring back to my bartender friends, I won’t bother with the lock. Same with stays at a campground I frequent. Families leave all sorts of stuff outside unsecured day and night. If theft were common, I would know about it.

Now if I’m on the GAP in Connellsville, PA or somewhere like North Beach in Burlington, VT, the lock always gets used. At night, I’ll secure the rear wheel to the frame and put the bike behind the tent inside the shelter.

I carry a basic lock that looks like below
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...12d6dec8e8.jpg
Otherwise it really depends on the situation when/how I use it.
In downtown Syracuse I even wheeled my bicycle inside a pharmacy to an Amazon locker to pick something up. However, enough other situations where I also don't lock up the bike.
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...57a2f2c1ba.jpg

As I noted above in a previous post, for daytime when I am only in a store for a few minutes, the skier lock is most convenient. Or a cable lock for overnight in campgrounds.

But, for my titanium bike, that bike is not my most expensive bike but it does look like my most expensive bike. So, I bought a Bordo 6100 link type lock. Over $100 USD. Not as good as a U lock and still quite heavy, it is the lock I use for most purposes when I ride that bike. And it came with a nice bracket that I attached to the bottom of the top tube to carry it. Occasionally, I heard some vibration noise on the lock, but a velcro strap solves that.

If you bring a key type lock, you must be better than I am at making sure you do not lose your key. I only bring combination locks anywhere.

On a bike tour I often use bolt on skewers instead of quick release, any 5mm allen wrench will open them. That is because my cables are often too short to go around both wheels. I keep a spare 5mm allen wrench with my spare tubes. The special skewers that take a special key, I know I would lose the key.

‘Xactly.

Even here in Brooklyn, not exactly the safest place to leave a bike outside, I'll go inside with the bike locked only by the straps of my helmet. Anybody that thinks they can jump on and ride it off is in for a surprise when the wheel locks up. A person that knows bike helmets could of course just unsnap it, but he'd have to assess the situation before he could do that and that would take just long enough for me to notice.

"Any of those U-Locks available in alloy?" ;) As a matter of fact...

Looks the business. Some miscreant EDCing a Leatherman* is not going to snip it.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...8bf3280e1.jpeg



* "I heard from victims through local cycling email lists. In almost every instance, they told me a cable lock was cut. Cable locks are not security and I even question if they are worth bothering with as a secondary lock. They can be cut so quickly, without noise, and with small hand tools that they should never be used." - Josh Ross writing for Bike Portland and Cycling News

14.5 pounds of bicycle and 22 pounds of lock and chain...

Rats! Its hopeless...

And dont think using an old beater is any better. In Galveston they steal bikes just to stay in practice...

I like my lightweight Abus 6055 Bordo, it is lightweight enough and higher security than a cable. That particular lock also fits in a jersey pocket nicely and doesn't take up space. I have a variant on that which is a little longer and does have the holder but that was won in a contest I would probably have gone with the smaller one but this one doesn't weigh a ton and the holder is nice so it can live on one of my bikes and not get lost in the house.

Other thoughtful security links:

https://keys.abus.com/eng/bike/produ...onent-security
https://www.bicyclebolts.com/
https://hexlox.com/
https://www.kryptonitelock.com/en/pr...ey/001768.html
https://pinheadlocks.com/
https://www.pitlock.de/en/
hmmm. Don't seem to be available anymore ---> Sphyke Combination Skewwer Lock
https://www.amazon.com/SUNLITE-Locki.../dp/B002K2IYPY

Kyrptonite
 

I have an older Kryptonite U-lock that I use. I have been fortunate to have lived in or travel to or from high theft areas but I guess anywhere could be the place so I tend to use the lock fairly often. I just have it in my backpack when I'm riding along with snacks, etc.

I once noted a front wheel, a seat and a water bottle, propped against a wall next to the receptionist at my wife's cardiologists office... Yep...

When I was in college, a friend had a small wheel single speed child's bike. He was small but the bike was still too small for him. It was a VERY old, coaster brake bike, more rust than paint or chrome on the rims. He never locked it anywhere. Rode it for over a year. Then, a tire blew out. He bought and installed a cheap new tire. That gave it value, was stolen within a week.

***

The bike in the photo below was stored outside for over a decade. I paid $5 USD for it at a garage sale. Took the photo of it when I got it home before I spent two days and $50 in parts to make it rideable. At the time I bought it, it was 17 years old, that was 13 years ago.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...9fd682e638.jpg

That became a great errand bike. If I have to go to the nearby campus for anything, that is the bike I use. It looks much nicer now, but those rusty steel handlebars still show the history of how much time that bike has been rode hard and put away wet.

Since that is the bike I ride when I ride to a high theft area, I used bolt on skewers, needs a 5mm allen wrench to remove a wheel. I do not bother to run the lock cable through the wheels when I lock it up.

That is the rule for light weight bikes. The weight of your lock is inversely proportional to the weight of the bike.

My daughter had a department store bike at college that she'd leave on the porch of her house. It was just used to get around campus and town since she didn't have a car, but only when the weather of her campus near the Canadian border wasn't frigid. One day she sees it is missing and calls, she's already a senior, and I tell her to just forget it, besides now she has a car. That spring she's walking to campus and sees a bike ditched on a lawn somewhere and sure enough it was hers. At that point though she didn't even want it anymore and just left it. Anyway, she now has a nice Cannondale that I fixed up for her and she doesn't ever leave it anywhere, especially here in NYC.

We should probably add a disclaimer to most of our recommendations. In a university town, your bike is not safe, period. Such towns often have well established criminal enterprises to steal bicycles and re-sell them, sometimes in pawn shops 50 miles out of town. That caveat probably extends to Portland, OR, Seattle, and Manhattan. But when I'm thinking of touring, I'm thinking about wondering whether I want to overnight in a small town, population 567, or ride another 20 miles to the big town, population 1,600.

A neighbor is a bike mechanic at a campus bike shop. Thus the vast majority of customers are students that live near or on campus. Many years ago he was telling me that there was a rash of thefts. Not bike thefts, parts thefts. A thief would use a cable cutter to cut the two shift and two brake cables, remove the stem cap bolt, and loosen the two stem bolts. Within seconds they could slide the stem off of the steerer tube and steal the handlebars, stem, and brifters as a complete unit. This occurred in the early days of brifters and there was a high demand for used brifters to install on older bikes that had downtube shifters.

When I ride my bike through campus, I am often surprised how many of the bikes I see in bike racks are 20, 30, 40 years old. A new nice bike is unusual. The bike shop my neighbor works at has a really good inventory of 27 X 1 1/4 inch tires because so many of the campus bikes use them.

A couple of the links I posted up in no. 17 are for products that make parts theft more difficult. At the very least, adding a layer of resistance from hex-key snatch and grab for the seatpost and that broken-in leather saddle seems prudent.

I did this ↓ oh, some ~20 years ago, I guess. Threat/response moves on; these days I'd probably use a penta bolt instead of what has become a fairly common security Torx.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...36c57a5394.jpg

True, true, fair enough, yet Heinz Stücke had his beater three-speed stolen - three times! Collin Martin had his "around the world" Moulton Marathon stolen in Kalgoorlie, Australia. The book about his ride is titled "Half Way Round". :(

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...8ec3395563.png

"Tie your camel first, and then put your trust in Allah.”

The thing is, one more Moulton on the street of Kalgoolrie- who would notice?

I mean, it's not like that's a particularly distinctive looking bike- it blends right in. Hopefully your story will at least administer a jolt of reality to those who imagine folks out in the country are so much more honest than city-dwellers that their couple-thousand-dollar bike can be safely left unattended among the yokels.

As to the OT, being an ex NYC bike messenger, there is no way i would ever leave my bike out of my sight unlocked. Touring, i usually take a lightweight (532 grams) Abus armored cable lock. Much much harder to cut than a plain cable- the armor shells crush with bolt cutters but are very hard to cut through with them, and they resist angle-grinder attacks well for their weight.

Someone once tried to steal my bike locked with an older, lighter-weight one on 23d St in Manhattan, and gave up before their angle-grinder cut it. Even though it prevailed that day, i would usually use something heavier in the city, but for touring, this is enough for anyplace you are likely to lock up. Actually, these days most serious bike thieves are only interested in electric bikes anyway, but you want to be able to resist attacks by casual/amateur/opportunistic thieves.

But of course he spent 50 years on the road full time so It was still a pretty infrequent occurance. That comes out to something like one bike stolen every 830 weeks on the road. To me something like my Trans America at 10 weeks was a long tour that happens rarely in my life with other multiweek and more rarely multi month tours scatter through the years.

So more likely than not I won't have a bike stolen when on tour. It is a possibility that I need to be aware of and take some precautions for, but with some situational awareness and reasonable care it just isn't as big of a risk as some make it out to be. So for me Depending on where I am it is often a light cable lock or no lock. Where it seems sketchy I don't let the bike out of my sight even if that means wheeling up and down the grocery aisles.

All that said, I do employ one other tool. I use bikes and gear that I can afford to replace in a pinch. It may be painful to lose much loved bike and/or gear, but I wouldn't have to abandon a long tour in the middle.

beater three-speed piled with heavy gear with no fenced value

YMMV :thumb:

I guess I don't have the same perspective as many on this since none of the bikes I have toured on cost over $1000 and most of them were old when I toured on them. The only one that was new was a $599 delivered Bikes Direct Windsor Touring. The others were 30+ year old bikes that had more sentimental value than cash value. These days they are lightly loaded with very little gear, some of it fairly nice, but with a pretty low total resale value for the whole package. So I too am probably a pretty poor target for most thieves.

I don't tend to relate to folks with real high dollar stuff that they in some cases can barely afford. It makes sense that they would be way more paranoid about losing their gear.