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@Steff
Also worth mentioning something about hardening - there are three basic cases:
1) No/insufficient hardening. Easy to cut/crop, no matter how thick it is, as it's just too soft.
2) Through-hardened. The whole of the steel is hardened. This is worst case for cutting with eg a grinder, but a through-hardened chain is more at risk from impact and bending. Cutting one side of a link with croppers will cause the other side to snap too (avec pretty sparks) saving a lot of the thief's time.
3) Case hardened. The outer surface is hard, making cutting awkward. The interior of each link is (relatively) soft, which prevents brittleness under bending/impact. Also, cutting one side of a link with croppers will cause the other side to bend rather than break - thiefytwat now needs to perform a second cut on the other side of the link (albeit it may be slightly weakened now). Poor the thiefytwat.