Coming out to your bike and finding the seat missing or a wheel gone is the worst, and replacing it is expensive. You can make it a little harder for would-be thieves to pilfer your seat by filling in the bolts needed to remove it with a little wax.
Image from due_mele
Fill each Allen bolt’s head with wax or bike grease, then push a ball bearing into it. Now anyone who wants to steal your seat (or wheels) has to remove the wax first, standing there scraping it (and the bearing) out before they can take the seat and run. You’re using a common theft deterrent: making yourself a more difficult target, which encourages thieves to move on to an easier mark. While this does also make it harder for you to take off your seat, the inconvenience is worth it. After all, you can spend as much time removing the bearing as you want — it’s your seat.
How to Stop Crooks From Stealing Your Bicycle Seat [City Lab]
Comments
8 responses to “Fill In Allen Bolts With Wax To Deter Bike Seat Thieves”
Nice Idea I guess if your bike seat was quick release like alot of them are you could put a dab of grease underneath in the hope that makes it more difficult to steal.
I’ve never understoood why people steal bike seats?
to state the obvious
you’ll be switching out ‘quick release’ if you’re leaving a bike in public places
I’m not a bike thief or a thief of any sort by any stretch of the imagination but I’ve already come up with a quick and easy work around to this just by reading it. I guess this is better than nothing but maybe a better idea would be to get security allen bolts.
“I’m not a bike thief or a thief of any sort by any stretch of the imagination… ”
Thanks so much for clarifying that. We all assume everyone here is unless stated otherwise. I assume you’re a car thief though?
Suppose a bike seat thief wouldn’t have a lighter on them would they?
I once had a more-than-reasonably-priced stereo in my car. The anti-theft measure that I chose was to fill the screw heads and allen bolts that I used with solder.
It worked marvellously well. Actually, a bit too well. It stopped thieves from pinching my gear but didn’t stop them from smashing windows on my car on multiple occasions to discover my life hack…
Reminds me of a Commodore I had, those old Commodores had horrible locks on them, you could open them with a 5 cent piece. I decided it would be a good idea to replace those shoddy locks with some higher quality ones, hopefully to make life harder for thieves. One day I got back to my car to find it had been broken into, instead of breaking the lock, they just seemed to have punched a screwdriver through the door, next to the lock, allowing them to unlock it, and of course ruining the door in the process. If I hadn’t of changed out my locks to more secure ones, I would have been much better off.
I had a falcon and theives broke into it by pushing a big screwdriver into the key hole and turning the whole barrel.
I had a friend who had an overdrive on his transmission and he deterred theives by making a five sided Allen bolt head.
Some cyclists uglify their bike by making them visually unappealing with random stickers and paint. One guy suggested a Huffy sticker, I googled Huffy and found that It is a brand name of those tiny kid’s bikes.