n'lock IN USE: It works, and how!
I've had several examples of the n'lock doing its thing: to me.
My bike stands in the hallway of my townhouse. I n'lock it at night. A few times I've forgotten to relock the steering. Grabbing the handlebars and trying to wheel the bike backwards is an absolute disaster. The first time the bloody bike, turning around the loose front wheel, got between my feet, tripped me, and I would have fallen, the heavy bike on top of me, except for the wall holding me up. The clatter and the noise was such that my family came running in to see what happened. Nobody's going to steal that bike from my house without waking up the house!
Nor is trying to wheel the n'locked bike forwards any more agreeable or even possible. The thing just won't cooperate. It's a great big heavy bike, and if it catches a thief unaware, he'll go sprawling, very likely with the bike on top of him, because the natural inclination is to hang on.
Even if the bike is held up by something, it really is very awkward with that loose front wheel. Example. At the supermarket I normally leave the bike n'locked in a packing space all to itself, locked to nothing. But on this occasion I had stuff in the pannier basket that I didn't want to take inside with me, and didn't want to get wet, so I locked the bike with the handlebar cable (see the photos further up this thread) to a handrail under the roof for the trolleys, basket to the wall side. The purpose of the cable was just to make it awkward for an impulse thief to reach across the saddle bag into the basket low on the pannier rails and against the wall under the handrail. But it also meant when I returned with my hands full of bottles that I couldn't get into the basket to arrange stuff without moving the rear of the bike only three or four inches. Read that again. Three or four inches were all I needed. But when I tried to drag the rear of the bike out, the front wheel flopped all over the place, and the bike, hanging rfrom the rail by the handlebar security cable, became entirely unmanageable, and soon I had an audience of no fewer than five people for the comic show. A lady eventually took my stuff from me and put it in her basket, and I relocked the n'lock and straightened the bike out so I could get at the basket. I asked a gentleman watching while his wife shopped to turn his back to me and describe me, and guess what, the police would have no problem finding me if I were a thief. Of course, a smart thief would be long gone.
Conclusion: The n'lock does what it says on the tin, it makes the bike impossible to steal by riding it away, and a very unattractive, even dangerous proposition to wheel even as far as a truck. It's what I paid for, and I'm eminently satisfied.
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A couple of notes:
The n'lock is packed with grease. Some of it will come out at the joints for a while (I presume it will be only a while) and needs to wiped away. I wouldn't mention this but the n'lock is intended and priced for bikes for the elite. I take the view that the grease you see exiting expensive engineering is proof that it wasn't built on a Monday morning by someone too hungover to walk to the storeroom for a new can of grease, but others may be less charitable. It's a tiny thing, but n'lock is such a pleasure to handle that getting oil on your hands even once (it happened to me only once) jars perhaps more loudly than is really justified.
When you use the cable and then relock the n'lock (remember, the normal, operating mode is locked, the anti-theft mode is unlocked, opposite way round from a car steering wheel), the pin of the cable cannot be pulled until the second stage of the procedure is concluded and the wheel and steering tube click together again. This could, conceivably, be a nuisance if the cable is tightly fitted to something and the handlebars thus difficult to swivel. Hasn't happened to me, though. You soon become used to turning the key and swinging the handlebars before you take the cable out of the lockhole.
Though I've taken care to give a full description, which takes far longer to read than performing the functions, either locking or unlocking the n'lock is as fast as operating a key in a car, much, much, faster than fitting a U-lock, faster too, though not by as much, than using one of those permanently attached Dutch ringlocks.
In use, the n'lock earns five stars out of five for convenience.
For the less than hundred Euro I paid on a special offer for a complete kit of parts and adapters, n'lock seems to me to be better value euro for euro than any other bicycle lock I've ever owned.
Copyright ©2012 Andre Jute