Cheep Cable Locks: Any Good?

Have a look at this photo, and make up your own mind:

This was all that was left of someone’s bike that’d been stored in the factory yard at one of my clients’ offices.

They had a break in just before christmas, and as well as a bunch of scrap metal, the thieving scroats took a bike belonging to one of the engineers. He’d left it there overnight, locked to the bike rack with a cheep cable lock.

I’m not going to go into the details about how these get defeated by your average bike thief, but as you can see, it’s not the cable that breaks, but the lock itself.

The moral of this sad story?

• Don’t use a cheep cable lock for anything other than locking a bike up when you’re going to be standing pretty much right next to it the whole time.
• The bike rack for this factory is in a nice secluded part of their yard. Always lock your bike up in plain view, or actually behind closed & locked doors.