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Family camping trip. We are taking my commuter CX bike and my sons little 16 inch wheel bike so nothing fancy. What do people do with the bike overnight? We have an extension on the tent so can put them in chained together and possibly to a gas bottle or similar. Don't really want to have to put them inside the car all the time and would be better in the tent when we go out for a day and don't need them.
Any thoughts?
it is in the New Forest if that makes a difference!
I always used to put around the bikes and then a long cable lock from that through the towing eye under the rear bumper.
You don't have many options.
1. Leave in tent and try to secure as much as possible but likely wont be insured, insurance companies usually state they have to be locked to an immovable object, which I dont think a gas canister would be defined as one!
2. Leave in car, much safer and its a small faff taking wheels off depending on size of car and if you need the space during the day, it might be a no go.
I do option 2 but only because it's either me on my own or with the Mrs.
Camp sites might have lockable storage but even then I'm not sure I'd trust that - who has access to it, what sort of lockup is it etc etc. For example we stayed at a bothy type place in Northumberland which had onsite lockable bike storage (you couldn't lock your bike to anything inside it) but it had the same access code for everyone.
serious lock locked to the towing loop of the car
Couple of these (two can't be unscrewed at the same time) with locks through the loops.
Either, chain it to the car, or something immovable (like you'd normally lock to) if that's possible.
Unless you're at an event which pro-thieves might be drawn to I'd say it's a lower risk environment.
Out of sight would be even better...
Actually, they hate cyclists in the New Forest so hiding the bike is probably a good idea 😛
We use two screw ground anchors, one at either end of the bikes, and a chain and various locks to lock the bikes to both anchors. It's very difficult to pull up the ground anchors without unscrewing them, and you can't unscrew one at a a time because the bikes stop you spinning it round. Not foolproof, but a casual deterrent.
We've locked to roof rack previously, chain through frames and then lock through roof bars.
Would hope it would put people off or, they would make enough noise to wake us up.
Find I'm a tad nervous until i've had a beer or two, then just plumb forget about it.
Cheers for the responses. Might have to go into the car overnight then and then stay in the car with a sheet over it during the day if we are out and about. With both wheels of it might even fit in the boot without taking a seat down to keep it completely out of site.
We take a 15mm motorcycle chain from the garage and loop it round all of the bikes (and something solid if I can). They are then covered with a waterproof bike cover, so are out of sight. I've never worried about anything more than this as there's no way you could move 4 bikes chained together from a busy campsite without someone noticing and forget any thought of cutting through a chain - it's not going to happen! I certainly wouldn't rely on a roof rack lock or anything like that - way too easy to bypass silently for a single bike. If I did need to leave them on the car, the big chain is looped around the lot, so it would be much harder (and noisier!) to get past.
Best of all, if the bikes are parked on grass, I'm willing to bet that even a pair of bolt-croppers would be pretty useless as you wouldn't be able to get enough leverage on them. All of the videos I've seen have a 20st chap bouncing up and down on them, with one end on a concrete floor - not something you can do on grass!
Like the ground anchors BTW - not sure the loops are big enough for my chain though!
Got a 4 metre pragmasys chain that I use to lock them to the rear axle of the van. Seems to work so far.
Obvious downside is that if they do manage to cut the padlock then I've just gifted them another 200 quid worth of loot.
As with any bike security question, my answer is "if they're going to nick it, they're going to nick it, so just do enough that the insurance pays out". In this case, I use a cable lock to the towing eye/suspension strut.
In fact, one of these:
In fact, one of these:
Without even checking, I know I could pick that lock in < 60s as it's the same as one in my pile of test locks that I have in the garage 🙂
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