Find my… bicycle?
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
I went with a hidden stem cap mount for an AirTag on my road bike. Completely unobtrusive.
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I immediately thought of taking a hammer and punch to this. (P. S. I'm not a bike thief by trade)
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I've been using the Elevation Labs AirTag Bike Mount for all my family's bikes for a couple of years now. $20 each. Also uses "security" screws to mount to the water bottle holders. Very visually low-key.
Did I mention $20?
Did I mention $20?
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Junk product. Easily identified and removed, and the alarm will mostly be false positives that immediately annoy people, and they won't act since they wouldn't have context as to what the alarm even is.
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Meanwhile in Japan...
https://soranews24.com/2020/08/20/h...o-to-protect-your-bike-from-thieves-in-japan/
https://soranews24.com/2020/08/20/h...o-to-protect-your-bike-from-thieves-in-japan/
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Albino_Boo
Ars Praefectus
A friend of mine had air tag tracking and knew the location of her stolen bike and the police weren't interested in recovering her bike. There's not much point of tags if you can't get it back. The only real protection is an angle grinder proof lock or something like a Yerka bike with a split frame that cutting will break the bike
https://www.yerka.world/?srsltid=AfmBOorLs8r0qaTFpbEzwJiI-cpYIPc52w13BC4TPpEclEy-JrPajRKu
https://www.yerka.world/?srsltid=AfmBOorLs8r0qaTFpbEzwJiI-cpYIPc52w13BC4TPpEclEy-JrPajRKu
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Keys? Hell, I have one in my car because I'm usually running late and forget to pay attention to where I park.
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You kids. Back in my day we'd buy a glitter suppository at the five and dime and handle this with one device.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
I use a bell with a spot for an AirTag. I’ve also seen rear reflectors with the same.
Hopefully thieves don’t think of these things.
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Certainly better than my idea of supergluing the thief to the seat.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
You have an iPhone right? It can record where you park automatically.
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Ask anyone who's had an expensive 1Up rack stolen if these security bolt solutions work. Hint: its' really easy to get the special keys/wrenches, and thieves just carry them around.
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Can you reprogram it to instead say in a slightly robotic, authoritative male voice "please step away from the vehicle"?
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Same. You would never guess there's an AirTag in there. It just looks like a bell. I also hid a second one inside the frame.
I don't know the alarm provides much additional benefit over the AirTag. People ignore car alarms... wouldn't they also ignore a bike alarm?
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I'm still waiting for one of these companies to partner with Fidlock. Seems like a missed opportunity here for Knog not to have done so. Until then, I've got a de-speakered airtag tucked into the steerer tube of my bike using a Fork Cork. Not sure how that'd work on a steel or aluminum frame bike, but no issues w/ signal on my carbon MTB.
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This. Even if thieves couldn't easily notice and disable this, statistically the police are never going to follow a tracker and rescue your bike. It's an up-sell item by the bike shop sales counter peddling false peace of mind at the cost of continual annoyance.
Meaning it'll probably be very successful if they market it right.
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I have an airtag inside the BB on my road bike. What I'd like to see is AXS or Di2 integrate with "Find My". They already have BTLe/ANT and so there might be a good chance they could do it with just a SW change. Doesn't add any weight and it's one of the most expensive and heavily integrated bits on an expensive bike. Ok maybe you could remove the AXS batteries if you were a thief but still it would make it significantly harder to resell.
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Given that airtags announce to someone that a "new" airtag is accompanying their travels, I question how useful airtags as security are.
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You can physically disable the beeper. Even unmodified, it's not that loud. I tested this, and if the person is riding they bike they probably won't be able to hear it.
It's not a perfect solution, for sure. But it's a good bit smaller and easier to hide than the item here, with longer battery life, and all you lose as far as I can tell is the alarm.
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Thankfully most thieves are not mastermind criminals. I had a dear to me bike stolen by a kid who rode it to work. Thankfully the air tag hidden on the bike showed me where he stopped. I drove over there, found the bike and put it back on the truck he stole it from. Without the air tag I would never have seen that bike again.
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If the thief can't quickly locate it, maybe they'll abandon the bike? I don't have an iPhone, so I'm not sure how easy Apple makes it to track down the tracker.
The alarm thing on this device sounds awful. Nuisance car alarms aren't bad enough, now we need nuisance bike alarms? That sounds like a good way to get a hammer taken to your bike by somebody who has no desire to steal it.
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So it's a variant on those motion-sensitive car alarms that everyone has learned to hate and ignore?
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
They aren't perfect but they are easy to set up and reliable. Nothing is going to prevent a determined thief from getting your bike. But even having a bike 'notify' the thief that it has an anti theft system may cause them to dump it rather than trying to bury into the thing and deactivate it.
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For ebikes shouldn't the airtag function just be in the control computer? If you remove the airtag it's no longer a functioning ebike and so worth as much as scrap metal. That would seem to be the logical endpoint of this IMHO.
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Citation needed... any decent thief will just jam a phillips screwdriver in and force it to rotate or take a drill to it...
Or have a small ifixit kit or something similar lol.
Edit: I guess this security screw needs a flat head and a hammer
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If you're going to use air tags on a bike, a lot of people suggest using 2, one in an obvious place to act as deterrence (which could be this device), and a second, hidden one, to actually track. A sticker that says "this bike is being tracked" is some deterrence, but might just encourage a thief to look for and disable the tag. If they disable one you might have a chance to track it before they find the other, though as others have mentioned a thief will still get the "an unknown air tag is traveling with you" notification so it won't stay hidden forever...
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Albino_Boo
Ars Praefectus
Android is the most common phone OS. No one is going to limit themselves to selling to IPhone users. I'm certainly not going to spend the cash on an iPhone just to buy a lock or a bike.
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If this device is only sold in the US then iOS is the more common phone operating system, not Android.
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Gosh, you'd think that, wouldn't you. But that's one of the shortcomings of the control system in my bike, which seems like a real oversight in an expensive, Bluetooth-equipped bike bought in 2024.
The thing with any anti-theft or tracking solution is that you're just taking your chances on whether the thief is casual and looking for an easy opportunity, or part of a professional ring with the equipment and knowhow to disappear your bike quickly and fence it on another side of the world. If you're "lucky" and your bike is stolen by the first group, you have a chance of getting it back. If a professional takes it, it's gone regardless of how many trackers you might have concealed somewhere.
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this security screw is a joke. but hammering on a screw driver might be tough if the head is a bit hard. but a small bent needle nose plier off the shelf probably works fine in place of a specific spanner wrench/driver.
my guess is that most thieves will just take their bolt cutter or grinder to this on the site of theft to 'disable' it...
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