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A man approaches a bicycle, handheld electric saw at the ready. He powers it on, starts to drill, and is shot in the face with a noxious spray that makes him vomit uncontrollably. This is the dream of the inventors of SkunkLock.
“Basically we were fed up with thefts,” said Daniel Idzkowski from San Francisco, one of the inventors of SkunkLock. “The real last straw was we had a friend park his very expensive electric bike outside a Whole Foods, and then went to have lunch and chat. We went out and his bike was gone.”
Idzkowski’s friend had used two locks, each $120, whose inability to stop a thief outraged him. “I blurted out, ‘why didn’t it blow his balls off?’”
He eventually landed on a less violent and more legal innovation. “I realized there really is no solution to this problem,” he said. “The biggest problem in this industry is that people don’t know that the lock that they bought for $20 is absolutely worthless. It costs at least $100 to have at least somewhere close to where you can at least curb the chances of a thief wanting to steal your bike.”
With the right tools, Idzkowski said, a thief could cut through most locks in less than a minute. Thieves, he said, “talk in seconds: a 15-second bike, a 20-second bike, and it goes up to 30-60-second bikes, with Kryptonite locks that require two cuts, each about 25 seconds”.
With his co-inventor, Yves Perrenoud, Idzkowski created a U-shaped lock of carbon and steel with a hollow chamber to hold one of three pressurized gases of their own concoction, including one called “formula D_1”. When someone cuts about 30% of the way into the lock, Idzkowski said, the gas erupts in the direction of the gash.
Read more here. (The Guardian UK)
“Basically we were fed up with thefts,” said Daniel Idzkowski from San Francisco, one of the inventors of SkunkLock. “The real last straw was we had a friend park his very expensive electric bike outside a Whole Foods, and then went to have lunch and chat. We went out and his bike was gone.”
Idzkowski’s friend had used two locks, each $120, whose inability to stop a thief outraged him. “I blurted out, ‘why didn’t it blow his balls off?’”
He eventually landed on a less violent and more legal innovation. “I realized there really is no solution to this problem,” he said. “The biggest problem in this industry is that people don’t know that the lock that they bought for $20 is absolutely worthless. It costs at least $100 to have at least somewhere close to where you can at least curb the chances of a thief wanting to steal your bike.”
With the right tools, Idzkowski said, a thief could cut through most locks in less than a minute. Thieves, he said, “talk in seconds: a 15-second bike, a 20-second bike, and it goes up to 30-60-second bikes, with Kryptonite locks that require two cuts, each about 25 seconds”.
With his co-inventor, Yves Perrenoud, Idzkowski created a U-shaped lock of carbon and steel with a hollow chamber to hold one of three pressurized gases of their own concoction, including one called “formula D_1”. When someone cuts about 30% of the way into the lock, Idzkowski said, the gas erupts in the direction of the gash.
Read more here. (The Guardian UK)
