steel wire rope lock free sample

4.Molded with a high-impact ABS body and a galvanized steel wire cable.The high-resilient ABS material does not break easily and is highly tamper-evident.

5.One end of the cable is permanently secured into the locking body.The other end is fastened with a click lock mechanism that provides quick and easy sealing.

Wire rope and cable are each considered a “machine”. The configuration and method of manufacture combined with the proper selection of material when designed for a specific purpose enables a wire rope or cable to transmit forces, motion and energy in some predetermined manner and to some desired end.

Two or more wires concentrically laid around a center wire is called a strand. It may consist of one or more layers. Typically, the number of wires in a strand is 7, 19 or 37. A group of strands laid around a core would be called a cable or wire rope. In terms of product designation, 7 strands with 19 wires in each strand would be a 7×19 cable: 7 strands with 7 wires in each strand would be a 7×7 cable.

Materials Different applications for wire rope present varying demands for strength, abrasion and corrosion resistance. In order to meet these requirements, wire rope is produced in a number of different materials.

Stainless Steel This is used where corrosion is a prime factor and the cost increase warrants its use. The 18% chromium, 8% nickel alloy known as type 302 is the most common grade accepted due to both corrosion resistance and high strength. Other types frequently used in wire rope are 304, 305, 316 and 321, each having its specific advantage over the other. Type 305 is used where non-magnetic properties are required, however, there is a slight loss of strength.

Galvanized Carbon Steel This is used where strength is a prime factor and corrosion resistance is not great enough to require the use of stainless steel. The lower cost is usually a consideration in the selection of galvanized carbon steel. Wires used in these wire ropes are individually coated with a layer of zinc which offers a good measure of protection from corrosive elements.

Cable Construction The greater the number of wires in a strand or cable of a given diameter, the more flexibility it has. A 1×7 or a 1×19 strand, having 7 and 19 wires respectively, is used principally as a fixed member, as a straight linkage, or where flexing is minimal.

Selecting Wire Rope When selecting a wire rope to give the best service, there are four requirements which should be given consideration. A proper choice is made by correctly estimating the relative importance of these requirements and selecting a rope which has the qualities best suited to withstand the effects of continued use. The rope should possess:Strength sufficient to take care of the maximum load that may be applied, with a proper safety factor.

Strength Wire rope in service is subjected to several kinds of stresses. The stresses most frequently encountered are direct tension, stress due to acceleration, stress due to sudden or shock loads, stress due to bending, and stress resulting from several forces acting at one time. For the most part, these stresses can be converted into terms of simple tension, and a rope of approximately the correct strength can be chosen. As the strength of a wire rope is determined by its, size, grade and construction, these three factors should be considered.

Safety Factors The safety factor is the ratio of the strength of the rope to the working load. A wire rope with a strength of 10,000 pounds and a total working load of 2,000 pounds would be operating with a safety factor of five.

It is not possible to set safety factors for the various types of wire rope using equipment, as this factor can vary with conditions on individual units of equipment.

The proper safety factor depends not only on the loads applied, but also on the speed of operation, shock load applied, the type of fittings used for securing the rope ends, the acceleration and deceleration, the length of rope, the number, size and location of sheaves and drums, the factors causing abrasion and corrosion and the facilities for inspection.

Fatigue Fatigue failure of the wires in a wire rope is the result of the propagation of small cracks under repeated applications of bending loads. It occurs when ropes operate over comparatively small sheaves or drums. The repeated bending of the individual wires, as the rope bends when passing over the sheaves or drums, and the straightening of the individual wires, as the rope leaves the sheaves or drums, causing fatigue. The effect of fatigue on wires is illustrated by bending a wire repeatedly back and forth until it breaks.

The best means of preventing early fatigue of wire ropes is to use sheaves and drums of adequate size. To increase the resistance to fatigue, a rope of more flexible construction should be used, as increased flexibility is secured through the use of smaller wires.

Abrasive Wear The ability of a wire rope to withstand abrasion is determined by the size, the carbon and manganese content, the heat treatment of the outer wires and the construction of the rope. The larger outer wires of the less flexible constructions are better able to withstand abrasion than the finer outer wires of the more flexible ropes. The higher carbon and manganese content and the heat treatment used in producing wire for the stronger ropes, make the higher grade ropes better able to withstand abrasive wear than the lower grade ropes.

Effects of Bending All wire ropes, except stationary ropes used as guys or supports, are subjected to bending around sheaves or drums. The service obtained from wire ropes is, to a large extent, dependent upon the proper choice and location of the sheaves and drums about which it operates.

A wire rope may be considered a machine in which the individual elements (wires and strands) slide upon each other when the rope is bent. Therefore, as a prerequisite to the satisfactory operation of wire rope over sheaves and drums, the rope must be properly lubricated.

Loss of strength due to bending is caused by the inability of the individual strands and wires to adjust themselves to their changed position when the rope is bent. Tests made by the National Institute of Standards and Technology show that the rope strength decreases in a marked degree as the sheave diameter grows smaller with respect to the diameter of the rope. The loss of strength due to bending wire ropes over the sheaves found in common use will not exceed 6% and will usually be about 4%.

The bending of a wire rope is accompanied by readjustment in the positions of the strands and wires and results in actual bending of the wires. Repetitive flexing of the wires develops bending loads which, even though well within the elastic limit of the wires, set up points of stress concentration.

The fatigue effect of bending appears in the form of small cracks in the wires at these over-stressed foci. These cracks propagate under repeated stress cycles, until the remaining sound metal is inadequate to withstand the bending load. This results in broken wires showing no apparent contraction of cross section.

Experience has established the fact that from the service view-point, a very definite relationship exists between the size of the individual outer wires of a wire rope and the size of the sheave or drum about which it operates. Sheaves and drums smaller than 200 times the diameter of the outer wires will cause permanent set in a heavily loaded rope. Good practice requires the use of sheaves and drums with diameters 800 times the diameter of the outer wires in the rope for heavily loaded fast-moving ropes.

It is impossible to give a definite minimum size of sheave or drum about which a wire rope will operate with satisfactory results, because of the other factors affecting the useful life of the rope. If the loads are light or the speed slow, smaller sheaves and drums can be used without causing early fatigue of the wires than if the loads are heavy or the speed is fast. Reverse bends, where a rope is bent in one direction and then in the opposite direction, cause excessive fatigue and should be avoided whenever possible. When a reverse bend is necessary larger sheaves are required than would be the case if the rope were bent in one direction only.

Stretch of Wire Rope The stretch of a wire rope under load is the result of two components: the structural stretch and the elastic stretch. Structural stretch of wire rope is caused by the lengthening of the rope lay, compression of the core and adjustment of the wires and strands to the load placed upon the wire rope. The elastic stretch is caused by elongation of the wires.

The structural stretch varies with the size of core, the lengths of lays and the construction of the rope. This stretch also varies with the loads imposed and the amount of bending to which the rope is subjected. For estimating this stretch the value of one-half percent, or .005 times the length of the rope under load, gives an approximate figure. If loads are light, one-quarter percent or .0025 times the rope length may be used. With heavy loads, this stretch may approach one percent, or .01 times the rope length.

The elastic stretch of a wire rope is directly proportional to the load and the length of rope under load, and inversely proportional to the metallic area and modulus of elasticity. This applies only to loads that do not exceed the elastic limit of a wire rope. The elastic limit of stainless steel wire rope is approximately 60% of its breaking strength and for galvanized ropes it is approximately 50%.

Preformed Wire Ropes Preformed ropes differ from the standard, or non-preformed ropes, in that the individual wires in the strands and the strands in the rope are preformed, or pre-shaped to their proper shape before they are assembled in the finished rope.

This, in turn, results in preformed wire ropes having the following characteristics:They can be cut without the seizings necessary to retain the rope structure of non-preformed ropes.

They are substantially free from liveliness and twisting tendencies. This makes installation and handling easier, and lessens the likelihood of damage to the rope from kinking or fouling. Preforming permits the more general use of Lang lay and wire core constructions.

Removal of internal stresses increase resistance to fatigue from bending. This results in increased service where ability to withstand bending is the important requirement. It also permits the use of ropes with larger outer wires, when increased wear resistance is desired.

Outer wires will wear thinner before breaking, and broken wire ends will not protrude from the rope to injure worker’s hands, to nick and distort adjacent wires, or to wear sheaves and drums. Because of the fact that broken wire ends do not porcupine, they are not as noticeable as they are in non-preformed ropes. This necessitates the use of greater care when inspecting worn preformed ropes, to determine their true condition.

To truly test the effectiveness of a bike lock, you have to think like a bike thief. From our experiences working in shops over the years and interviewing professional bike thieves (yes, we’ve done that), we created a list of the most common tools that bicycle thieves use to defeat bike locks. It became the checklist that each model in our group of locks would need to survive to become a pick.

To be clear, the following is not a guide to stealing bikes. But to assess the security of bike locks, you have to really understand how they get stolen in the first place.

Lock picks: These require a lot of skill to use, and different locks require assorted tools and pose varying degrees of difficulty to pick. However, once a thief has the tools and the proficiency to quickly open a particular lock, the process merely becomes a matter of walking the streets and looking through racks of bikes for a target lock they recognize as being easy to open.

Cable cutters: Thieves carry out a large number of bike thefts (possibly most of them) using a simple pair of diagonal wire cutters. Unfortunately, the only reason simple diagonal cutters are so effective is that many people continue to lock their bicycles using just a braided steel cable and a padlock or a basic cable lock, even though such devices should be used strictly as accessory locks in most situations. A good set of bypass cutters can cut these locks in a single pass, and a tiny set of diagonal cutters can do so with multiple snips.

Bolt cutters: During Duncan’s work in shops over the years, he has heard hundreds of stolen-bike stories and has seen many cut locks, and most of them (not including snipped cable locks) have been cut with bolt cutters. Bolt cutters can be quite small and are quick to cut through certain kinds of locks.

Hacksaw: A hacksaw can work through a nonhardened lock quickly. Most chains from the hardware store, cheap U-locks, and cable locks can be defeated with a hacksaw. A hacksaw can be slow on a thicker lock, may catch and bind while trying to cut through a cable, and takes some physical effort to use in general.

Cordless drill: This is a rarer tool for bike thieves, as it works well on only a few types of locks, and most of those are also easier to defeat using other methods. But occasionally drills do see use (most often during an attempt to drill out a lock’s core). The locks that drills work well on (such as folding locks) have become more popular, though.

Angle grinder: A thief with a battery-powered angle grinder will defeat any lock if given enough time—at least, any lock available for purchase as of early 2022 (see What to look forward to). For the thief, the biggest drawback of a grinder is the noise and sparks it emits as it grinds through hardened steel. In the past, cordless tools didn’t have the power for such uses, but battery technology has advanced enough that they can perform just as well as their corded counterparts, and thus they have changed the landscape of bicycle security. It’s hard not to notice one of these tools, but a thief who can mask the noise and is brazen enough to use one will probably be successful in stealing the bike.

We did not pry open any locks with car jacks, because the jack would have to fit inside the shackle. You can make that kind of attack more difficult by using good locking technique, which means choosing a lock size that leaves very little room inside the shackle to fit a tool—all of the locks we tested were too small to accommodate a jack.

After we had our list, we needed to decide how the results of the tests would allow us to rank the locks. We believe that any form of security is only as good as its weakest part—think of a locked house with an open window, for instance, or a computer operating system with a backdoor. So we decided that the more quickly a lock could be opened, regardless of how well it performed in other respects, the lower it would score.

The first test would show if any of the locks could be picked (some could). The second would reveal whether any would fall victim to bolt cutters (some did), hacksawing (sadly), or drilling (no problem). The last would demonstrate how long each lock would take to cut through with an inexpensive portable angle grinder (quicker than you might think). After we completed all the tests, we ranked the locks based on their security and price to see where they stood, and then we factored in features such as durability, weight, portability, and ease of use.

An OnGuard Beast chain lock being picked in 30 seconds. The tape is holding on the mechanism cover that John Edgar Park cut out to explain the vulnerability to us; we taped it back into place. Video: Duncan Niederlitz

We contacted John Edgar Park, an avid lock-picking enthusiast and instructor with over 20 years of experience, and we sat down together to review all the locks we had received. With a quick visual inspection and a few pokes from one of the many pointy tools he had brought along in a folding leather pouch, Park immediately singled out how each mechanism worked and the easiest way to defeat each lock. Park also taught us how to pick a lock, which he managed to do to one model in less than 30 seconds. It’s a simple raking technique (video) that requires little skill and basic tools; someone could do it with a couple of pieces of scrap metal from a car’s wiper blade or a pair of bobby pins. And we had always thought MacGyver was a joke!

Just to be sure, we also got in touch with a lock-picking group, and we visited on a night with a presentation on disc-detainer locks, a type of high-security mechanism used in some bike locks. The meeting was in an unmarked room in an unmarked building. We learned that even the more basic disc-detainer locks we brought were very hard to pick, and nobody at the meeting had the proper tools to fit the smaller keyways most bicycle locks use. As a result, we came away confident that disc-detainer styles were secure against most lock-picking thieves.

In February 2021, a YouTube expert who goes by the name LockPickingLawyer posted a video in which he said that tools for picking disc-detainer locks were becoming more common—in fact, he designed one himself that’s now available online and that he used to open our top pick in 46 seconds and our upgrade pick in 58 seconds. Given that the brute-force methods we tried took even less time to destroy a lock, though, we remain less worried about lock picking than we do about bolt cutters and angle grinders.

The next test: bolt cutters. These tools are available at any home improvement store and usually make a sound during a theft only after it’s too late, when the lock splits apart and the thief is off with your bike. You could be within 20 feet of your bike and still not hear it. For our tests we used cutters of two lengths, a 24-inch HDX pair from Home Depot and a 36-inch Tekton 3421.

Some of the locks we tested claimed to be resistant, but most of them fell to our bolt cutters eventually. The easiest U-locks to cut through appeared to be only case-hardened, which seems to do little to stop bolt cutters since the tool’s jaws can crush and split the softer metal underneath the hardened shell. More expensive locks are hardened more thoroughly, via a different heat-treating process.

We weren’t expecting notable results from the hacksaw test, as even modest case-hardened steel usually deters a hacksaw. However, the Altor and TiGr locks we tested were both made of titanium, which is tough but not very hard, and the hacksaw proved that: With the hacksaw, we cut through each lock, held in a vise, in less than 30 seconds. Using the vise probably resulted in a cut time quicker than that of most real-world scenarios, but practiced thieves have vise-like tricks (using zip ties or leaning against the bike to steady it). The RockyMounts U-lock we tested used stainless steel, a material rarely found in bicycle locks, which to our eyes appeared to have been left unhardened; despite the lock’s large shackle diameter, our hacksaw cut through in just 90 seconds.

Although a small cordless drill is louder than bolt cutters, it’s still barely noticeable over the sounds of a busy street. The drill we used in our testing was a 12 V Milwaukee Fuel, which is small enough to put into a jacket pocket. While the Altor gave in to the bolt cutters and the ABUS Folding Lock Bordo Granit X-Plus did as well after much effort on our part, the drill easily defeated both. A quick look was all we needed to see that the hinge was probably the weakest component of each system, and we quickly removed the locks by drilling straight through the rivet holding the hinge together.

We knew all the locks would fall to the 7,000 rpm of an aluminum-oxide disc—we just weren’t sure how long it would take. After years of hearing anecdotes from bike-shop customers, reading marketing literature, and removing the odd lock here and there, we expected it would take more than a minute for us to complete one cut.

We charged all the batteries we had for our cordless grinder, made extra coffee, and mentally prepared for the hours of grinding that lay ahead of us. Then the first lock took 14 seconds to cut through. The next, 15. Some of the locks couldn’t survive past the 10-second mark; the thickest and strongest ones resisted for only 30 seconds before we made one cut.

We learned that no lock available at the time (2017) could resist cutting for more than a minute against modern tools, even if it was a chain or had a dual-locking shackle and needed two cuts for removal. Granted, we did these tests under ideal circumstances with each lock in a vise to create an equal setting for the locks, but after testing locks in more awkward and unrestrained positions and seeing only a marginal increase in time, we can say that our results aren’t too far off from what you can expect in the real world. Even if it’s painfully obvious that a bike is being stolen, it seems to barely cause any alarm or attract attention, as demonstrated in one of our favorite videos.

So why bother to lock a bike? It unfortunately comes down to beating the bike owners around you—after all, you don’t need to outrun the bear, you just need to outrun the other person with you. If you can ride a less expensive bike and lock it up properly with a better lock in a safer location, you can remove the temptation for a thief to pick your bike over an easier target.

Proper locking technique: The U-lock goes through your bike’s back wheel and seat stays (the pair of diagonal skinny tubes that connect under your seat). The cable adds protection for your front wheel. Video: Kyle Fitzgerald

• ALWAYS CONFIRM ENGAGEMENT OF CABLE LOCK ON WIRE BEFORE APPLYING THE LOAD:By pushing the adjustment pin in the opposite direction of the arrows on the cable lock and then pulling the cable also in the opposite direction of the arrows on the cable lock.

• PULL ADJUSTMENT PIN BACK AND PASS WIRE ROPE THROUGH KWIK-LOC:Failure to pull adjustment pin first may cause damage to serrated teeth and reduce holding capacity.

• WORKING LOAD LIMIT (WLL) MUST FALL WITHIN THE STATED WORKING LOAD RANGE OF THE CABLE LOCK:Each product is load rated and incorporates a minimum safety factor of 5:1. This WLL takes into account the specification criteria of the Rize Cable Lock and the wire rope.

• Spray Painting: of the Rize Suspension Hanging System after installation is acceptable, at the installing contractor’s discretion, if the installing contractor physically confirms engagement of each cable lock on the cable prior to and after painting, and in strict accordance with the Rize Installation Instructions. Brush painting is not acceptable. Do not paint Cable or Cable Lock prior to installation. Do not reposition Cable Lock after painting.

• When installing Rize cable attachments: to buildings or equipment careful consideration must be made to the attachment method and the material being attached to. It is the responsibility of the installer for the proper selection, installation and appropriateness of the attachment to the job specifications and any codes. Rize can give general guidance, but any questions regarding this should ultimately be directed to the project engineer of the job.

Consider push mount cable ties made of heat-stabilized nylon 6/6, rated UV94 V-2, and serviceable to 239˚F. Stainless steel cable ties also offer excellent resistant to high temperatures and weathering.

For an outdoor utility cabinet or any outdoor cable enclosure, UV resistance is important. Weather-resistant cable ties are an ideal solution. Beaded cable ties can work here too, if they’re UV resistant. For heavy duty applications try strap and buckle ties or stainless steel cable ties.

For example, you can secure scaffolding netting and sheeting, and even the scaffolding itself, with heavy duty strap and buckle ties, which are perfect for demanding applications. The steel teeth on the buckle grips the strap permanently while the acetal strap has excellent weatherability. Stainless steel cable ties, Type 316, give you corrosion and high temperature resistance. They’re also weather resistant while providing outstanding chemical resistance.