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Theft prevention

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Matt2matt2002:
Sorry to hear your news PH.

I've been in similar non bike situations and they happen so quickly. But in a funny kind of way, also so slowly. I wanted to move quickly but my brain and body were in treacle.

I'm sure we'll all learn from your experience.
So thanks for sharing and best wishes for a full recovery.

Matt

Andre Jute:
I'm sorry to hear about your travails, Paul.

There's something else to consider here for those of us who are a good bit older than the attacker/thief. A point comes -- and it has been my attitude all my life -- where if someone shows me a weapon, I take it off them and instantly use it on them, a weapon being anything from a fist through a knife to a firearm. The thing is, one can't be half-hearted about it, or one might get beaten up badly, and I suspect most members of this forum have had a more genteel upbringing than mine. (I've survived some violent places, including the assassins of a sovereign state, twice, and South American Nazis, because it didn't occur to them that the intellectual in the good suit who looks like Huggy Bear could be so much faster than they are.) There was a time when one could assume that the police would be on your side, but today the police in the UK appears (from across the Irish channel) to be woke and slack, and therefore likely to charge you instead of the would-be thief. And I wouldn't count on the magistrates understanding that older folk get one change to hit back, and only one chance. If the older chappie will hit back only weakly, either because he's physically not as strong as he was, or he was brought up in a more civilized era, in any event not hard enough to take the thief out instantly, resistance may result only in being beaten up worse, or even going to jail for "excessive violence" -- by the police's standards, not those of real life.

That's one of the reasons I was so keen on trying the n'lock, and why it has worked out so well for me, and why I was happy to work out another way to charge my phone on the bike than up the head tube. For those who don't know what the n'lock is, it's a clever piece of Swiss engineering that unlocks (yes, the very name is a pun on how it works) the steerer column from the stem and handlebars, so that the front wheel of the bike flops around uncontrollably (1). The would-be thief takes a faceplant within a couple of paces, and will be dazed enough for even the oldest forum member to step up at his leisure and kick the thief in the head hard enough to keep him out, or, if you are squeamish, just step on his head and knock it against the ground hard enough to keep him out while you mount your bike and ride away. I don't advise sticking around until the police arrive. Tell nobody your name and ride off, and save the bother and legal expenses.

(1) There are quite a few threads on the n'lock. Here is the original thread introducing the n'lock to the forum:
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=3930.0
And this may be worth reading too for a concise history of the n'lock:
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=14207.msg105908#msg105908

JohnR:

--- Quote from: Andre Jute on February 03, 2022, 07:47:42 pm ---(1) There are quite a few threads on the n'lock. Here is the original thread introducing the n'lock to the forum:
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=3930.0

--- End quote ---
I've put the correct link to n-lock (https://n-lock.com/) at the end of that thread as the previous link was corrupted. Scaling from one of the photos suggests that the equivalent stem length (centre - centre) is about 80mm which is too short for me. Otherwise I would be tempted.

Andre Jute:
80mm for the fixed version of the n'lock sounds about right. There is also an adjustable version which in the straight position is 100mm, if I remember correctly. None of this means that the latest version(s) are those measurements -- it would be easy to change the blueprints to insert or remove some length in the stem in front of the part where the key is fitted, because all the critical parts of the n'lock are behind that, on the head-tube side of the stem.

Thanks for the correction, John.

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