Text & photography by Mark Masker
      Locking up your bike can be kind of a pain (but not as much of a pain as replacing it). You have to carry the lock and make sure you remember to remove it before you ride off—not to mention that good locks can be a bit pricey (but not as pricey as replacing your bike). Locking your bike costs a minute of your time. But if your ride is stolen all those hours you spent customizing it are lost. We came up with a few tips that may help you avoid this sad situation.
      There are three basic ways to lock your bike: on its own using a steering lock or a disc lock to immobilize it; to a stationary object such as a telephone pole or hand rail; or frame-to-frame to another bike when traveling in a group. One thing applies to all three situations: common sense.

We spoke with peace officers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Connecticut about Harley theft. We asked them what riders could do to better secure their machines. The boys in blue were kind enough to take time out of their busy ticket-writing schedules to give us some useful info. Here is what they had to say:

1. Use common sense. Park your bike in a well-lighted public place.
2. Thieves often target bikes in advance and watch riders to learn their daily routine. Vary your travel route between home and work to throw off a thief ’s timing. Be aware of people that seem to be following you. Thieves often use spotters at rallies to find specific bikes that they want to steal. In one instance, a thief in New York was caught and was carrying a Christmas list of American and Japanese bikes in the area that he just hadn’t gotten around to stealing.
3. Although thieves will steal bikes from a variety of places, certain places are preferred targets over others. Parking your bike in a home garage is best because the bike is nowhere to be seen, locked up indoors. Subterranean parking garages such as those in apartment complexes seem to attract thieves because most underground parking is easy to break into and people frequently don’t lock their bikes when they’re home.
4. Secure your garage as well as your bike. Motion sensor alarms and lights can protect not only your bike but the small fortune in tools you have surrounding it. It’s also a good idea to lock up any tools in the garage that a thief could use to steal the bike (such as power saws). According to the Los Angeles Police Department, there have been burglaries where the thieves avoided the secured house and robbed the alarm-free garage attached to it.
5. Use locks appropriate to the task. That $5 combination lock may protect your kid’s locker at school but it won’t work nearly so well on your $30,000 bike. A decent disc lock sells for about $35, large U-locks start at $70 and Cobralinks start at $159. Scooter and bicycle locks are too small to stop a determined thief. Cheap little locks are cheap for a reason.
6. Understand what a lock is and what it will do. A bike lock is a deterrent, not a guarantee. Proper bike security is as much about where you park a bike as how you lock it up.
7. Use multiple locks on your bike. The more locked-up a bike is, the longer it takes to steal. Time is valuable currency to a thief. Make him spend a lot of it if he wants to steal your baby.
8. When using a floor anchor, park your bike directly over it and lock the anchor to the frame of the bike. This makes the anchor harder for the thief to reach and therefore harder to defeat.
9.  Don’t leave excess cable or chain on the ground when locking your bike. This robs thieves of the cutting surface and leverage they need to break the chain.
10. An alarm by itself will not stop a thief from taking your bike. An alarm in conjunction with a lock is better because while the thief is breaking the lock the alarm is alerting everyone within earshot as to what the thief is doing.
11. Don’t depend on your ignition lock to protect your bike. Breaking the ignition and stealing the bike is extremely common.

Thieves use a variety of ways to break locks. Hacksaws and bolt cutters are commonly used for small locks, but require time and effort to break open good locks. Power tools are also used, but while they are more efficient, they’re noisy and conspicuous. Deep freezing a lock happens but is rare due to the difficulty and expense involved with obtaining the chemicals. Also, some locks are tested to withstand cold temperatures well below the freezing point of the chemicals used to freeze them. Lock picking is another method, but it requires skill; and if the lock is hard to reach, picking it becomes even more difficult.

It’s generally a good idea to unlock your bike before you ride off into the sunset, as this poor disc can attest. It was the sad victim of a very embarrassed friend, a disk lock and a short memory.