Locks that work

If you can leave locks at work/around post that should be OK but if the risk is that high (i'd imagine losing a custom bike would be) would it not be less stressful to just get a beater that rides well enough for the 40 mile round trip? And then just leave a big chain around the post?

I know, defeats purpose of having nice bike etc..

Fair enough. Thanks for answering, I'd been looking at the almax/pragmasis chains and saw they both came with these. If the lock's so easily picked why do they still use the lock?

Both companies are selling the chain. The padlock is just an accessory to make the lock worth it.

The chains are good, with the Almax being the best. But the Squire lock is silly... the Abloy on the other hand is a beast and you can pick them up on eBay for a reasonable price (I'm betting a number of those are swiped from workplaces as they have an industrial use).

1. No space for another bike.
   
2. No money for a beater, or at least... I can afford £150 on security but I'm not going to get a decent beater at that price.
   
   

I have a nice bike, I love riding it. It's insured, and I'd get the full cost of replacement... but I don't intend to lose it as it's custom and I love riding it.

leave a key for the locks you leave at work in your desk, I've had to ride home for lock key before now

With the Abloy you can order extra keys... I'll get 3, one for the office, one for the bag and one at home.

Fair enough. Was only a suggestion.
Anecdotal evidence would suggest it'll be OK. I freelance all around London and am constantly leaving my "good" bike locked outside for 10hrs+ with a Krypto Fag and heavy abus chain and it's been fine. I do shit on it when I leave though.

This could be the future of the bike lock world:

http://www.thebikecollective.com/lock-locks-video/

I'm Steve at Pragmasis. There are lots of lock-picking videos on YouTube but you can never tell which are genuine from those where people have doctored the cylinder inside in advance (e.g. these locks have removable cylinders so it's easy to take out half of the pins, for example, and then make the video), or where they're practised for ages with that specific lock, or where they've got advance knowledge of the profile of the key. Squire have checked into several of these claims and have never come across anybody that can pick an unknown SS65CS lock in a realistic situation like those videos suggest.

Independent of all that, we actually use a different cylinder inside the SS65CS and SS50CS locks anyway. It is a 'restricted' cylinder that has a much more convoluted keyway and we've not heard of anyone, ever, being able to pick it. We switched to that cylinder last year and Almax are now using it, too. These locks are not 'accessories' that are trivial to pick.

The PL362 is an excellent lock, but not with these chains, and especially not with a 'thin' 19mm chain like Almax's. There is far too much clearance on the shackle so someone with bolt croppers can gain access to the shackle beside the chain. The following video (in German) demonstrates, albeit with a smaller Abloy 'PL342' lock and a smaller chain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiaOSf2sQxM

It is important that the chain link fills most of the space below the shackle on the lock, unless the shackle is as thick or thicker than the chain link. This is why neither Almax nor we sell our 16mm or 19mm chains with the PL362. FYI RiDE magazine did a locks & chains review with proper testing earlier this year and scored our Protector 19mm identically to the Almax Series IV - we both got joint first place.

If anyone wants to see any of our stuff in the flesh, we will be exhibiting at the Cycle Show at the NEC in September and we'd be very happy to show you what our stuff is like.

Steve, I'm unconvinced.

especially not with a 'thin' 19mm chain like Almax's

and

FYI RiDE magazine did a locks & chains review with proper testing earlier this year and scored our Protector 19mm identically to the Almax Series IV - we both got joint first place

When you refer to your competitor as having a "thin" chain, yet it is the same thickness as your chain and you both scored jointly first place in a review... then you've put your comment in a negative light. It doesn't read as impartial from the outset, and I get that... why would it be, as you'd like to sell your product.

So on that footing your comment feels like it's trying to dissuade me from purchasing something from elsewhere, unfortunately that single word 'thin' taints the rest of the reading even though you've put good info into the comment.

But let's look at the PL362 and your claim that it is incompatible with, and provides enough space for bolt cutting, around the Almax IV 19mm:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUGpQPujiEM&t=4m5s

Looks like the PL362 fits the 19mm Almax really well, and without offering enough space for a good enough pair of bolt cutters to get in and attack the padlock. I'm with you that the 16mm chain and this lock are not a good pairing, but the 19mm chain and this lock look good.

It is important that the chain link fills most of the space below the shackle on the lock, unless the shackle is as thick or thicker than the chain link.

My emphasis, but the PL362 has a 25mm shackle and the chains I'm looking at are 19mm.

To offer a comparison video with:

1. A different lock
   
2. A different chain
   
   

Well, that is not a like-for-like comparison.

I'm only wishing to protect my very lovely custom bike against 3 things:

1. Bolt cutters
   
2. Pickers (though there are few of these in the wild)
   
3. Part strippers
   
   

For the bolt cutter protection either the Almax chain or your Protector 19mm chain would be up to the task, and I considered both equally.

For pickers, the Abloy remains unpicked, and the Squire has these YouTube videos. I figure that the bodies and shackles are equally difficult to bolt cut (lack of space, shrouded shackle, high hardness) and that from a bolt cutter perspective the Squire is as good as the Abloy.

But when it comes to pickability, even if I ignore the YouTube evidence as suspect, which key pattern did I trust to be more unpickable?

The Squire key:

Or the Abloy Sentry key:

I'm far more convinced about the Abloy ones. Even if everything else is equal, and ignoring doubt raised by YouTube videos of Squires being picked, the key of the Abloy is the thing that leads me to believe that the risk is mitigated to a greater degree with the Abloy than with the Squire.

So I'm sided with the Abloy PL362, and I circled back around to chains. There are videos and blogs showing the PL362 being well-suited to the Almax chain, fitting snugly and solidly. I couldn't find any to demonstrating that the Pragmasis chain is equally well suited to the PL362.

BTW, you could improve your product description here by providing measurements of the internal space in the links, the width of that space... as the reason I have chosen the Almax chain is because I could find info, and see in a video, that the lock was compatible with the chain without offering an additional attack vector (space for bolt cutters).

The final part of my equation is just a motion alarm. This will only ever be locked outside my office, under my window. Anyone that touches the bike is going to have me there in 30 seconds, but watching them within 10 seconds. So I feel somewhat confident that no-one is going to strip parts, without moving the bike, in the time that they have available to them.

I can't do anything about angle grinders, but that's the nature of the game. At least those are noisy.

Hi Velocio,

Sure, I want to sell my product, but more than that I want proper information and to allow people to make reasoned decisions. I will actively encourage people to buy products from other companies if I think they are better suited to their needs.

I said 'thin' re Almax's chain because it is less than 19mm across the 'flats'. It is not round but is slightly square. This gives them a commercial advantage in terms of campatibility with the standard SS65CS lock as their chain fits and ours doesn't so we have to get Squire to make a special version with a slightly wider opening (only 1mm clearance, though). However, my point here is that their flattened shape means there is more clearance inside the opening on the PL362 lock, and that could be significant for croppers and grinders. With the SS65CS, it is insignificant, but the PL362 is a different thing altogether.

You say the shackle on the PL362 is 25mm but that is actually the vertical clearance, which is not that important. The horizontal clearance is my main worry as that is 30mm, so lots of room for croppers or grinders to get in there next to a chain link. I was also talking about the thickness of the shackle itself, which is only 15mm (so far less than the 19mm chain). Hence our concern that the shackle is very exposed and at 15mm thickness could be a major weakness when partnered with a 19mm chain. I would not do it if I was you.

The video you quoted is made by a chap called Adrian Weber. He has also made several videos on our chains and other products, e.g. :

http://youtu.be/LFafq-u7wqQ

You could ask him what he thinks about the chains in comparison and whether the shackle clearance on the PL362 is a concern.

The Squire keys you photograph are the Quick-Change/standard profile. I think Squire dropped the QuickChange option last year. We never used it. We don't use the standard profile and our 'restricted' keys are different. However, these Squire keys are 'conventional' profile keys and I would agree that the Protec cylinder (which is the one to have in the PL362 - beware not all PL362 have the same cylinder inside!) probably is harder to pick. That is theoretically speaking as we've not heard of anyone ever picking either of them, including 'Bosnian Bill' who has done a lot of work with Adrian - search YouTube for l-o-t-s of videos from someone that really does know his stuff and can pick almost anything and his videos are genuine! We checked the restricted cylinder with Adrian and with Bosnian Bill before we switched to it last year. As far as I know, he has never been able to pick it. Even so, picking virtually never happens in real life: Thieves like far more reliable types of attack, such as hammers, croppers, jacks etc. Hence, the concern about shackle vulnerability is a far bigger issue than the pickability of high-grade cylinders in our opinion.

I'm not sure why you found it difficult to find the dimensions on our chains as we quote this for our whole range:

http://securityforbikes.com/security-chains.php#linkdimensions

Does that give the information you were after?

Personally, I'm not convinced of the value of 19mm chains on bicycles in general as the advantage they give over 16mm is basically down to angle grinder resistance, and realistically an angle grinder has a chance of getting through anything. The usability disadvantage of a 19mm on a bicycle, however, is huge. I'd rather see a 16mm chain looped through multiple parts of the bike than a 19mm just around the top tube, for example. We have seen multiple cases where frames are cut in order to separate a chain, and the bike is gone. Your multi-part strategy should have a major deterrent against attacks like that and I applaud that type of approach. Every deterrent is a good deterrent :-)

Does that help?

I'm not sure why you found it difficult to find the dimensions on our chains

I was looking at the product page, the "Detailed Info" link which goes here: http://securityforbikes.com/proddetail.php?prod=P19-x.x

I'm not convinced of the value of 19mm chains on bicycles in general as the advantage they give over 16mm is basically down to angle grinder resistance, and realistically an angle grinder has a chance of getting through anything.

Very true, I've cut a few myself. However the deterrence of a 19mm chain compared to a 16mm adds a little to the risk mitigation.

My bike is custom. It's rather ridiculous, the majority of motorcycles cost less. I'll be locking it on a London street during the day, and the bike screams high price tag. I'll go for every insane option I can, especially as even though it is fully insured the money is totally irrelevant... what matters is that I'm not sure the framebuilder is even making new frames any more. If it gets stolen I will never get an equivalent replacement. A 19mm chain for a usability headache is fine... and the chain will do the frame and rear wheel... Kryptonite mini for the front wheel, Xena alarm on the front disc (most likely to move).

Does that help?

Yes.

I'll still go for the Abloy PL362 though.

Then again... if it does get stolen, I wouldn't want to be the thief.

It's an extremely distinctive bike that thousands of London cyclists would recognise instantly due to me running this place and it being a beautiful bit of bike porn.

To stop people stripping parts have you though about atomic 22 bolts?

Ah, that product detail page is just inside our shopping cart, whereas our 'Info' pages have the main guff on our products. It is on my to-do list to restructure the site to make all this easier to navigate. Apologies that it is not as easy to find info as it should be. Most people come to our cart via the info pages, but if you bypass that then you may think there is a dearth of detail. Checkout the other pages (at the top of the navbar) if you want detail on any of our stuff, and we always try to answer questions ;-)

I'll still go for the Abloy PL362 though.

Fair enough, but PM me separately with an address and we'll send you a 13mm offcut link and an 11mm link as well, FoC. If you put one or other of those in the gap next to the chain, whichever is the tighest fit, you should be able to obstruct access to the shackle and get the best of both worlds, hopefully. I'd be interested to know if this works as we've got loads of offcuts from the smaller chains and it might be something of use to others :-)

My budget only stretches so far, and the alarm will get me there pretty quick.

Just a quick anecdotal plug for the Kryptonite New York M-18.

At Highbury & Islington station this weekend I saw three uniformed police officers using bolt cutters with handles well over 3 feet long to try to remove one.

After 5 minutes my bus arrived and I left but they had succeeded in nothing but working up a sweat. Definitely requires some serious machinery to remove.

£90 for a tool that could get you any bike you wish.

David - I've read all this and I would just get a beater.

I would be super paranoid if were you and had to lock up the Mather on the street.

To put that in perspective, although only a little, grinders are very rarely used for stealing bikes. It does happen so it's small consolation if you are a victim, but it is very rare. It's a somewhat different story for agricultural and industrial kit, but for bikes it's a better situation.

There is also a huge difference in capability between mains powered grinders and cordless grinders, with the latter often getting low on battery power and especially so with cheaper cordless tools and with the thicker chains etc. There is another huge difference across different cutting discs, and again, another big difference when cutting things that are not held in a vice - the thicker materials/deeper cuts get more dangerous anyway and especially so if the parts are not held very firmly. Trying to keep chains etc off the floor and to obstruct access to them does make it a little more awkward for you, but it also makes it a lot less appealing for a thief with whatever tools.

At the end of the day thieves don't want to get caught so if you want to keep it more than they want to nick it, you will hopefully keep your stuff.

I think it is a shame when thieves muck up the lifestyle of law-abiding people, but it does happen and I suppose it's a case of minimising the disruption & worry. Of course, not riding the Mather to work may mean it's left at home where you won't be able to respond to an alarm going off, and thieves are potentially able to work indoors and out of sight. If it is a really special thing to you, then having it nearby and multiply-locked as you plan could actually be the best security you can have for it ...assuming it's locked to something really solid :-)

It's sort of noisy.

And from most of what I've read, you probably need a couple of discs and a couple of batteries to grind through an 18mm shackle. Obviously that's well within the grasps of a really serious thief, but sadly a lot of this is about being harder to steal than the nearest equally valuable bike.

Would like to see you do that on Squire's top level restricted cylinder rather than the basic one in this video, on a lock in real use, not comfortable in your chair, under pressure of being caught, some crud and stuff in the lock from regular use and so on ...
Picking is cool but mostly showing off.
Used often by real thieves? ... not so much .... jus sayin :-)

@Velocio have you rang Almax yet? If not give the guy there a call.

He just spent 25mins explaining bike security to me. Some amazing DIY hacks suggested!

Plus one to a beater.
For £150 you could easily build something... Considering Apollo build 2 bikes from freecycled parts from the forum...

Also if the mather is that precious, the chance of scratches and scrapes with £150 of cold hard steel + london peds + london cars + general street detritus is huge... Beater, no shits given, makes sense to me.