Bike Security

Jesus christ.

I'll see what they say.

Emailed.

Cheers hongman

I used to do this:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&so...01.94,,0,15.02

One Almax 4 through the rear wheel and around lampost. One Almax 4 through the rear wheel and over the seat effectively locking the rear wheel to the bike. Both on a single Squire lock.

A right faff, but I slept well

(I no longer live there, so not worried about posting locations/security details)

Hi there

Representing forums.sv650.org I would like to enquire whether or not you would consider doing a forum discount.

A thread was started by myself recently regarding bike security and you guys came up in the topic. Since then a few members have expressed interest in the Anti-Pinch Pin in particular.

Personally, I am after an Anchor, Chain and Pin.

Can you offer any incentive discounts, and/or package deals for forum members?

You can see the thread here: http://forums.sv650.org/showthread.php?t=154134

I look forward to your reply.

Hiya,

Thanks for the enquiry and sorry for just a quick reply at the moment.

I've had a quick scan through the thread you mentioned and there are various accuracies and inaccuracies that I may be able to help with when I get a mo'.

Can I just check if Almax are already giving a discount to SV650 forum members? Or any other security manufacturers/suppliers?

I'll try to make time to register on the forum and respond to the thread properly tomorrow. I think we'll be able to do something to help, but it'll probably be more along the lines of helping with multiple purchases, such as the package you mention, rather than just discounting the price on the Pin when it is bought as an add-on to a chain & lock bought from elsewhere. I'll explain more on the thread (although it's pretty obvious that there is likely to be more scope for discounts on larger sales).

...And yes, it can be only a matter of seconds to remove a wheel, and it is silent, too.

Cheers,

Steve.

Sounds promising. He replied at neigh on 11pm, great customer service there!

Lets see what he has to say tomorrow and give him a nice welcome to the org!

[Mr Speirs]

Yup I have had great service from those guys. I have the Anti Pinch Pin and there Uber Ground Anchor. They were out of the ground anchor but emailed me the instant it came back in stock.

Is that Stephen Briggs from Pragmasis ? If it is then he was very helpful with me at the beginning of this year with regards to getting an Anti-Pinch Pin for the SV . I actually owe him a picture as well of it installed for the site , I will get my camera ready tomorrow and send him one

Originally Posted by xXBADGERXx

Is that Stephen Briggs from Pragmasis ?

Yes, it was.

He says that their chains are also bolt cropper proof, and if that is the case I am more than happy to get all my products from one place . Saves on shipping, discount is a plus!

My ZX is ground anchored outside my bungalow under car port with an Almax chain and squire lock, urban chaina nd lock, disc lock alarm (xena), brake and throttle clamp a cover and wedged in by my Galaxy, but remember if they can not see it, they wont nick it, the gardenais a good option but front is ok, you would be surprised what people will sleep through and just how easy/good the thieves are, get an Almax IV expensive but worth it and get it covered.

http://www.almax-security-chains.co....ies-IV/c-1-70/

They say it's the:-

*Worlds toughest security chain!
*The only 19mm quadruple tempered security chain!
*Case hardened (not through hardened)
*Carbon manganese alloy steel enhanced with boron.
*Thatcham Approved
*Impervious to hand bolt cropper attacks!
*Hacksaws useless!
*Zinc plated with gold passivation for maximum corrosion protection.
*Almax's long link system allows:-
-You to lock your chain off tight, stopping sledge, wedge and freeze attacks dead in their tracks!
-Multiple Almax chains to be secured with just the one lock!
-It to utilise Squire's flagship lock the Squire stronghold SS65CS
-With a solid hardened steel lock body (no cheap plastic here)!
*Hardened boron steel shackle
*Anti drill protection on cylinder
*Over 260,000 key differs
*Independent CEN 6 rating!
*Cannot be bolt cropped due to it's solid steel closed shackle protection!

Hi,

This is Steve, from Pragmasis. We manufacture the Anti-Pinch Pin, the Torc Ground Anchor, the 'Protector' range of chains, and various other bits. Neither of us have got an SV, but I did have a GSXR, if that's any good?

I might be able to clarify a couple of things, perhaps dispell some myths, and maybe help out a bit. I will surely miss a couple of questions, so feel free to ask either through this thread or by contacting us direct. Our product range and contact info is on our web site:

http://www.torc-anchors.com

Originally Posted by Mr Speirs

As Badger has said, Torc Ground Anchor, Almax Chain with Squire Padlock and an Anti-Pinch Pin through the frame (in between cylinders on an SV) and that's the most you can do.

It is shocking how easy it is to cut or break a lot of the commercial "security" chains on the market. Virtually all of the big name manufacturers seem to be making product in the Far East and I suspect spending a lot more on the likes of shipping it half way round the world and the marketing they do in this country, than they do on the metalwork itself. And it shows. Almax chains and our 'Protector' chains are the only ones we would use for serious security - we consider our Protector 16mm and 19mm chains to be equivalent to the Almax Series III and IV. Chains from other manufacturers all seem to be using inferior raw material and far inferior heat treatment. Almax and we use the same heat treatment company, because they are the best. They are also very expensive, which is probably why (as far as I know) no other security chain manufacturers use them. You have to pay for the specialist process that boron steel chains require if you want to get the best performance, and if you want to get consistent performance. We know of a certain big name manufacturer that has produced chains where one link was hard and the neighbouring link wasn't - that is an obvious symptom of heat treatment being done in a heap, where the critical gaseous atmosphere can get to the links on the outside of the heap but not to anything in the middle of the heap. It's a lot cheaper to use HT companies that take shortcuts on that and on the similarly critical quenching and tempering processes - these are also critical if you are trying to achieve a chain that has a surface that is hard enough to resist sawing etc attacks, with a core that is tough enough to resist freezing-and-hammering attacks. Most of the commercial chains seem to be too hard all the way through, and are therefore too brittle.

You get a clue if you bother to look closely at the individual chain links: If the metal has been bent smoothly, without distortion to the profile and without kinks, and if the weld is 'full penetration', cleanly finished and without cracks/fissures, it is probably one of the better chains. The majority of big name manufacturers are producing chains that fail on one or more of these simple visual checks. If the material has been butchered as the links have been shaped, you can be pretty certain that it is not as strong as it should be, as there will be areas of excess stress within the link. We've seen many chains where the welds have been incomplete, even with rust leaching out of the joint - if there is rust, you can be pretty sure there is a crack, and cracks are never strong! This is all commonsense stuff, really.

We also believe that the best profile for a security chain is round. As simple as that. If you have a square or hexagonal/etc shaped bar, there are edges/ridges in the profile which make it easier to get the first 'nip' with bolt-croppers. Once you've got that nip, you are halfway through.

So, we'd suggest you should always go for a round-section chain with well-formed links and good welds.

The material quality and the heat treatment can't be judged easily, but you can get a clue sometimes by dropping a bit of chain on a concrete floor - if it 'rings' too much, it is probably too brittle. That gets easier to judge with experience, and all chains will make some kind of ring/clatter, but it is only a clue. You can't be sure without a metallurgical analysis. We do that on every batch of our chain - we get a lab test so we know the actual surface hardness, case depth, and the core hardness on every batch we produce. This is an important quality check as it reflects the quality of the raw material and also on the heat treatment that it has been through. We also do some other checks on every batch, but the lab test is the most important in our opinion.

Chain Sizing: A "16mm" chain is made from 16mm diameter bar. The link dimensions vary from manufacturer to manufacturer but are usually similar to our 132 x 62mm outside dimensions on our 16mm. We produce a range of Protector chains, with the 19mm being sold mostly to the MoD, the 16mm more run-of-the-mill for bike security, the 13mm used a lot for high-end push-bikes and as a carry-chain for motorbikes, and the 11mm for mid-range push-bikes etc. The dimensions are all on our web site:

http://www.torc-anchors.com/security...linkdimensions

We guarantee that both the 16mm and the 19mm chains are impossible to bolt-crop by hand, even with the Irwin Record 42" bolt-croppers. Those croppers are designed to cut non-hardened steel up to about 13mm diameter, but they can cut a 16mm chain that is of low quality. They are borderline on good quality 13mm chain - we can't bolt-crop our own 13mm chain and neither can Sold Secure, the independent testing agency endorsed by the Police and insurers etc. Indeed, just last week our range had its annual Sold Secure audit and everything passed with flying colours. You can check for yourself by going to their web site and entering "Protector" into the keyword field on the following page, for example:

http://www.soldsecure.com/search/

You can see that our 16mm and 19mm chains have Caravan Gold, which is a significantly higher standard than Motorcycle Gold. Feel free to compare with others.

Thatcham are another testing agency. We don't rate them for physical security products like locks and chains, but they are the ones to trust when it comes to alarms and immobilisers. In our experience, a lot of products that fail Sold Secure's more rigorous physical test standards, get put through Thatcham testing. That is not always the case (I'm sure Almax's chains would pass Sold Secure tests with no problem), but it has happened in several other cases.

Originally Posted by darrens_here

having been victim of a theft recently, our bikes were in a locked garage, chained to ground anchors.... and they still got stolen.

If they want them, they will take them. The only "defense" is you make yours look less like an easy steal than someone elses. Do all you can.. but the theiving scumbag @@@@'s will take it if they want it.

All of these things are a deterrent. It is a matter of balancing that to the risk. I'm sorry to hear of anyone having anything stolen, but I also disagree with generalisations that sound so defeatist that it encourages people to become easy prey to the thief. "All chains are a waste of time because they can all be cut with a grinder/croppers/etc". It is extremely rare that thieves use angle grinders for stealing bikes; it does happen, but I'd guess 99% of bikes that are stolen are using no security at all, a cable lock (don't get me started on that one ), just a disc lock and/or alarm, a rubbish-quality chain/lock/anchor, or they are using the security in a way that exposes an easy way around it. Do you want to be an easy target in the eyes of the thief?

Grinders are dangerous to use, and if you asked me to grind one of our chains when it's not in a vice, I would refuse, even if it's lying on the floor (which it shouldn't be if you're using it properly). The chances of the disc snatching on a wobbling chain link are too high. These discs spin at 7,000rpm on cordless grinders or at about 14,000rpm on the (much more powerful) mains grinders. The disc can shatter and explode if it snatches. That is really not funny. OK, the thief doesn't have to do all the Health and Safety stuff we have to do, but he still doesn't want to get hurt. Grinders are also very spectacular and noisy, so that probably contributes to the rarity of their use by bike thieves (thankfully).

If you've just got a disc lock, whether alarmed or not, and he's got a van at the ready, there's a very good chance your bike will go. Virtually all bikes are stolen by being lifted into a van, so to have any confidence you need to lock your bike _to_ something solid. Most thefts also happen from home, so that is the priority to get the security right: a good ground anchor with a good chain and a good lock, all installed & used properly. That means don't get a ground anchor and fit it on a tarmac drive, or on block paving; don't get a good chain and wrap it just around a wheel - yes, wheels really are easy to remove, and it's silent - always always go through the frame if at all possible. Don't put a chain through something like a footpeg that unbolts, or can be broken off; it has to be structural to be any good. Keep the chain and lock off the floor - hammering is a good way and a quick way of breaking poor quality chains, but if they are up in the air, it is much harder for a thief to hammer them against anything solid. It is also harder to use bolt-croppers on something high up.

Originally Posted by Mr Speirs

Hongman you may want to get all your security from Torc-Anchors then they should give you a discount on the APP. The chains are of the same strength and durability. The only other thing I forgot to mention is that if you are putting a wall anchor on if it goes into Brick it isn't the most secure it can be, into concrete is better.

I'll come to discounts in a bit - you've got to read through more of my blurb before you get to that

An anchor is only as good as the surface it's mounted on. Concrete, as a rule, is much stronger than brick. Tarmac, blockpaving, and plasterboard are all useless. The Hardie anchor is made in the Far East and is supplied with a single expanding bolt fixing. They make a claim about how strong that bolt is. It is virtually irrelevant in my opinion because it's not the bolt that is the weak point - it's the concrete or the brick! In our opinion, any anchor with less than 3 fixings is very vulnerable to being wedged/hammered and lifted. A single fixing is crucially dependent on the quality of substrate over a very small area; a 2-fixing anchor has a vulnerability to being clouted from one side and from the other side. Only 3+-fixing anchors actually hold the thing down in both directions - how many one-leg or 2-leg stools to do you see? It's the same thing: 3 or more legs makes it stable, just the other way up in the case of an anchor

Originally Posted by Mr Speirs

I forget who advertises it but they reckon that if one of the torc ground anchors using their epoxy resin set bolts were to get installed on a concrete ceiling you could hang a transit van from it. They reckon its 3t of force to dislodge it.

That isn't us. We use 4 fixings and we recommend the chemical resin over the expanding bolts (aka "shield anchors") whenever the substrate is suitable. The things we use are also used by people like Rolls Royce for holding down their jet engine test rigs! They have about a 3 tonne load capacity each, and we've got 4 of them. _However_ the concrete is often not that strong, which is why we deliberately put the fixings as far apart as we can - they are at the corners of a rectange measuring 100mm x 60mm - that is a lot of concrete to spread the load, but the concrete is still likely to be the weak point. Compare that with a single fixing anchor, or one that fixes only over a couple of inches, and you can see what is likely to fail first.

We had someone contact us last week who had used a crowbar to pull out his Kryptonite anchor! He wanted to use our chemical resin fixings when he re-installed it. We pondered on the merits of supplying an upgrade to a competitor's anchor, but thought what the heck and helped him out.

There are situations where the resin is not suitable, and that's why we also offer a fitting kit that uses expanding bolts. They are nothing like as good, which is why our Torc ground anchor is the highest-rated on the market **when it is used with the chemical resin fixings**, where it has Sold Secure Caravan old, but it just Motorcycle Gold when used with the expanding bolts. The resin approach is good for solid substrates like concrete, but brick walls have voids in the mortar joints etc and there we have to use the expanding bolts. We've still got 4 of them, and they're still well spread out, but they don't get such good performance from the substrate and that is usually the limiting factor.

Originally Posted by gettin2dizzy

Anti pinch pin looks like a great idea. I'm sure I'll get one soon as it'll go through my rear axle like this.



Quick, and looks very secure

Anyone with a Triumph or Ducati or BMW single-sider makes me instantly jealous as that is where the Anti-Pinch Pin is such a good solution. I designed it to help secure my GSXR and my wife's 748R, and the latter was a no-brainer because the rear axle presented such a perfect route for it. The GSXR was the tricky one, and we couldn't make a pin that was strong enough if we went through any of the axle or swingarm pivot etc holes, so we had to make it thicker and that meant we had to offer it in a lot of different lengths. The single-sided swingarm bikes are great because you can use a short Pin, and you can dangle the chain down from one side of the bike, through the ground anchor, and up to the *same side* of the bike, which means you can use a shorter chain, which is cheaper! Brilliant! That is what is shown in the photos above (although ignore the tarmac under the GA - it was a photo taken in a car park and not a real installation at all ). The rest of us that have to lock bikes by 'skewering' the Pin through the heart of the bike, as best as we can, have to use a longer chain going from one end of the Pin to the other, but that can still be easier than struggling to route a chain through something not-as-structural. If you don't need to use a Pin to put the chain through something structural, don't! The Pin may be the weak point in the setup, but certainly not as weak as just going through a wheel! The Pin is hardened and could certainly be attacked with a grinder, but if a thief is coming with a grinder it may be academic what he cuts as he could cut anything with it (but see the notes at the top about grinders).

I'll say something about discounts in the next reply as this is already a massive post

In summary, our philosophy is that you should take some responsibility for protecting your property and not rely on insurance, you should use security that is appropriate and that has no obvious weak links (and part of that is how you use it as well as how good it is), and if you avoid advertising what you've got (use a scruffy old bike cover!), you are much less likely to have a bad day. Don't buy security that is too heavy for _you_ to use every time - there is no point in having Fort Knox security and leaving it lying on the floor! Sometimes a compromise is sensible, or pragmatic, and a heck of a lot better than nothing. Usability is important, and so is quality.

I hope that helps. Feel free to ask questions or to contact us direct.

Cheers,

Steve.

Hi again,

Gosh, it took me quite a while to write that last post and I see there have been a few more posts in the meantime - this is a busy place

We do try to give great customer service. We just try to do sensible, reliable, good quality stuff and to supply it in a friendly and helpful way. I'm sure the Dragons' Den guys would tell us to stop all sorts of things we do, probably including the Anti-Pinch Pin (too much of a distraction, not enough profit), but we like to help people out and we like to make stuff, here, in the UK! A lot of our stuff has been designed because we had a problem ourselves, so we use a lot of it on a daily basis. Not everything - there's only so many things you need to chain down - but we certainly learn from our experiences and try to make improvements along the way. E.g. one of my projects at the moment is to make a better jig for welding our ground anchors - I actually do the welding myself and am happy to discuss technicalities with anyone that is interested. I like welding

I also make the Pin using the lathe we have here. Regarding pricing, we started out about £10 cheaper than our current price because we expected to sell a lot of packages with ground anchor and chain and lock and Pin, where the other items are able to subsidise the manufacture and cost-recovery for the Pin. "Cost-recovery" because, for example, it cost a good fraction of £1,000 to get the Pin Sold Secure tested when we first developed it (I can't remember the exact figure). We need to recover that from the margin we make on each Pin, and at the lower price we were basically making nothing when we sold a Pin on its own. The majority of Pins have been sold like that, and because it's a bit of a pain of a product in having lots of different lengths and most of them being time-consuming to pack for shipping out, annoying issues with Squire not machining their locks consistently, and lots of discussion being involved when people aren't sure if the thing's any good or not, we found ourselves spending a lot of time getting nowhere and not doing much in the way of paying back that Sold Secure test fee and other development etc costs, let alone making much money from the idea. We don't sell that many, and took the decision last year not to renew the test certification with Sold Secure as that was a noticeable chunk of cash as well. In fact, we can't get the grade of steel in the right size at the moment to make any more, so we'll have to spend more time to sort that out and material costs never go down.

All in all, we can't give discounts on single Pin-only sales. Sorry. Come to us for 3 Pins and we can certainly do something to help, though! Do your homework first, read the blurb on our web site about using a broomhandle etc to gauge the length(s) of Pin required, and decide if you think it will really help you to secure your bike in your situation:

http://www.torc-anchors.com/anti-pinch-pin.php

Having said all that, we do have a bit more room on bigger sales and suggest that people e-mail us in advance to confirm what we might be able to do. It is difficult as we already discount our RRPs significantly in the Package Deals we offer, and anything over £100 gets free shipping as well. The Package Deals are often discounted 20-25% from RRPs, and the free shipping basically knocks about £9 straight out of our margin.

Our RRPs are also lower than several other suppliers, when you compare like with like. Not all chains are equal and not all anchors are equal, for example.

If we offered another 10% across the board, we'd be doing quite a lot of quite high value sales with a lot of product included, for about £30 margin, which isn't really good business for us. It means we are working hard to just stand still. In real terms, that means we're going backwards. Maybe that sounds greedy but we have to be at least a bit business-like if we are also going to supply stuff that is of the quality that it is and if we are going to continue manufacturing in the UK. We have zero intention of moving manufacture elsewhere or of dropping quality, or of dropping our customer service (which takes a lot of time, incidentally). We have also been stung in the past when we've offered discounts and previous customers have come back and asked for a refund. Being nice people (or perhaps I should say 'soft' people!), we gave refunds in those cases, although we didn't bargain for that when we worked out the discounts we could do. We really can't do retrospective discounts any more as it's crazy from a business standpoint.

In summary, talk to us, preferably by e-mail as it's a pain when the phone goes and I'm half way through a weld Tell us you're from this forum and what package you're thinking of, and we'll give a straight answer if we can do anything more to help. If you group together a bit so we are shipping out a single box and doing one load of paperwork, that is better for us than lots of individual orders and is more likely to come into the free shipping etc categories anyway. Try to help us and we'll try to help you.

Cheers,

Steve.