New Year’s Resolution: beef up your bike security at home

Forget ground-hog day, in your household let some day soon be ground-anchor day. Bolted on to concrete and laced with beefy chains, ground anchors can help protect your pride-and-joy should thieves break in to your garage. Here BikeBiz.com takes a look at three of the toughest ground anchors on the market, the Torc Ground Anchor, the Abus Granite WBA 100 and the Kryptonite Stronghold Anchor.

Naturally, all three require the use of tough locks too. Fit the meatiest and, for practicality, the longest you can afford.

TORC GROUND ANCHOR

The made-in-the-UK Torc Ground Anchor uses a 20mm diameter hardened steel shackle and comes with a choice of six different fitting kits to get the best fixing for concrete floor, brick wall, block wall, concrete-in, awkward situations or van. The injection resin kit is the toughest and can be used in place of expanding bolts.

Here’s the resin being installed: the glass capsules are broken by the bolts.

When fixing any of the ground anchors, use a tube to blow out every last piece of concrete dust. This ensures a more secure attachment to the ground. 

ABUS GRANIT WBA 100 

The Granit 100 from the German security specialists has a 16 mm round shackle made of hardened steel. It can be mounted to the ground as well as to the wall. A plastic sleeve fits over the mounting plate and shackle. The ground anchor pack comes with masonry bits for fixing the Granit WBA 100 into concrete.

KRYPTONITE STRONGHOLD ANCHOR

The Stronghold Anchor from American security experts Kryptonite has a 16mm hardened carbon alloy steel shackle. 5/8” cement anchor bolts are installed directly into concrete. The pack includes two masonry bits, one for a pilot hole the second for drilling the final hole. The Stronghold Anchor also has a plastic sleeve.

As well as ground anchors it pays to fix your bikes to other immovable objects in your garage such as this ain’t-going-anywhere shelving unit.

Use a combination of chain locks, u-locks and ground anchors to protect your bicycles. Keep the locks away from the ground (it’s easier for a crim to cut through a lock when it’s on terra firma) and try to use individual locks for each bicycle rather than daisy-chaining them together (that’s then just one lock to cut for multiple bikes, or sometimes just one frame to cut through, leaving the chain untouched). Tooled-up thieves will also cut through frames to get at expensive wheels so lock through the wheels AND both triangles: cutting a frame twice doubles the workload and some crims may baulk at that.