- Locking up your bikes is really important
even if you do have somewhere secure to store them,
like in your house or in a garage.
Now ground anchors or wall anchors are the best
and the safest, and the most secure option to use,
but they're only useful if you install them correctly
and you know how to use them.
(whoosh)
(sword slash)
Now first things first,
you're going to need to get yourself
a good quality ground anchor.
Now, like when you buy any lock for your bicycle though,
they're sold with ratings to their security.
There are Thatcham rating,
which is generally toward motor bikes and stuff,
and then you get a Sold Secure ratings.
Now, I've got a few different examples here
and they're very different as well.
This one here is quite unusual.
This one is called an Air Lock.
This actually mounts on to a wall.
This is quite a cool idea
if you've got maybe an apartment or something
and you've got a posh bike,
and you want to hang it and it locks securely.
Works nicely, but that's not what I'm going to be using today.
I'm going to be using something a bit more traditional.
These are more traditional ground anchors
that go on the floor.
They have a cover over top of them,
so if you fitted one in the garage for example,
you can drive your car over top of it no problem.
There fundamentally is a a plate
with a big shackle loop on there,
and basically it bolts to the floor
and you lock everything to this.
Now, where you place your ground anchor or wall anchor,
is absolutely vital because it adds additional security.
Now, there's a big school of thought that says
by mounting them on the wall,
you're going to make it even harder for a thief to get to it,
'cause you could mount it on the wall say,
that back wall there.
Likewise, although this is designed,
and many of the are designed so you can drive over them,
if you had them on the floor in your garage,
putting them in the middle of floor means it is technically
a bit of a weak point as well,
so you want to make sure
that whatever you're using this for,
it could be for a motor bike,
it could be for bicycles,
you try and position it in a place
that is the hardest angle to get any work on
for what would be an attacker.
What I'm going to do is mount it underneath here,
quite close to the wall behind me,
so then I can daisy chain all of my bikes together
and I can drop another chain down to it,
and so effectively, they're all locked together
and they're all locked to the ground.
Pretty much the safest position they can be in.
Just think about it when you mount them.
Now, you can mount these to various different surfaces.
You can put the in the back of a van.
That would be a great idea, but of course that means
putting a big bolt through the van to do that.
In this case, I'm mounting to a concrete floor,
which gives you two options.
There's also different recommendations depending
on which brand you buy.
There's several on the market,
so do a bit of homework for that.
This one, uses proper concrete fixings.
Now, I have a solid concrete base under here,
so that is absolutely fine for it.
However, if you don't have a solid concrete base,
or maybe you've put in some sort of filler
or something like that,
putting these fixings in is not a good idea
because it can damage the concrete
and it can weaken the mount.
The idea is that these are permanent fixings,
so once they're in,
fit and forget until you actually
have to dig the ground up to get them out.
The other option available to you
if you haven't got a proper, solid concrete base,
is a chemical or a resin fixing.
That involves still drilling the same sort of hole
to take one of these fixings,
but instead of the fixing bit
grabbing onto the concrete and expanding,
you actually fill that hole with a resin mix.
It's a special chemical bonding agent basically,
and that makes for an extremely good fit,
and you can screw into that and it will not damage
the concrete or whatever it is you're screwing into,
and it will give you just equally as permanent a bond.
But for today, I'm using the tradition ones,
straight into the concrete.
Now, depending on which ground anchor you have,
you're going to need a few tools for the job.
First up, you're going to want some protective eyewear
because bits of concrete can go flying everywhere.
You're going to need some drill bits.
Depending on what sort of drill you have,
I've gone SDS Plus Drill,
so I'm using SDS 16 and eight ml bits.
Eight ml to drill the pilot hole,
and 16 to drill the bigger hole.
You're also going to need a hammer,
and you're going to need a really good drill.
Now, what I mean by that, is not a cordless drill.
You want a proper plug in option
because basically you've got a lot more welly
for really getting into that concrete.
It's going to make the job a lot more easier.
I've got an SDS Plus drill.
It's going to make light work of getting into there.
Now, something to factor in is depending
on where you're working,
it could be quite loud,
so you may want some ear defenders.
(smooth music)
There's a few steps to the process here.
First is identifying where you're going to put your anchor.
This is where I've marked mine out on the ground.
I've actually marked around with a knife,
because on top of my concrete floor,
I have this heavy duty rubber flooring.
I actually want to peel away a section
so this is completely flush on the floor,
just so it can be as secure as possible.
I actually did this,
but there we go, I won't be needing that.
That is going to sit there, it's going to sit flush on the ground.
(digital beeps) Okay, so I'm in position.
There's three holes.
I'm going to do one at a time
to make sure it lines up correctly.
First up, it's just to mark the pilot hole
using the smaller drill bit.
(drilling) (light music)
Time for the second hole.
Change those bits on there.
This is the big hole, ready to accept the plug.
(drilling)
It's absolutely vital
that you can get the dust out of the hole,
otherwise there's a chance that the plug
won't grip properly,
so make sure you take you're time doing this.
There's no rush.
(vacuum suction)
Okay, so with the hole clean,
you want to get the first plug into place.
Snug, but it should go in okay.
You may need to tap it.
This case, I've needed to.
Just going to remove the allen bolt from there.
I'm going to line this up in to the hole
so I know exactly where the others need to be now,
so, I'm going to do my pilot holes for number two,
then the bigger hole, and then I'm just going to check
it lines up just before doing the final hole,
just to make sure they're in exactly the right place.
(drilling)
Now, clear that one out and the last bit into place
in the hole.
Sometimes you need to just check they're in okay.
Okay, so now it's time to tighten the bolts up
and make sure that they pull
the anchor plate onto the ground.
There you go, I can feel that pulling now.
Just got to make sure
that I'm applying equal pressure to all of them.
You want to tighten these things up
so it really pulls the plugs into the concrete
to hold it in place.
Now that's in place,
but to further secure it 'cause you can obviously
still see the exposed allen bolts, allen heads even,
I'm actually going to hammer in ball bearings
into the top of these.
That means you cannot get them out again.
(hammering)
Solid.
That is not going anywhere.
Now finally, I can just put the top cover in place.
Doesn't really do a lot.
It's more there just to make sure
if you got a car or anything,
you can drive over it, but still it's an addition layer
to prevent it being tampered with,
and this just bolts into place with the supplied allen bolts
and then our ground anchor is in position.
There we go.
There's out ground anchor ready for use.
(whoosh)
Now we've got our secure ground anchor in place,
it's all about how you lock your bikes together.
As you can see, I've got a fleet of bikes here.
They're all my work bikes,
and I like to lock each bike to each other,
and then I'm going to lock that successive chain of bikes
to the ground anchor using a big chain.
Now whilst D type locks are really, really strong,
and they're great for when you're out and about
'cause they're a bit more convenient to store
on the bike or perhaps in a bag,
you may as well take advantage of using big,
heavy duty chains when you're at home,
because they don't have to go anywhere.
You can get some seriously heavy duty chains
and use them accordingly.
But something that's really important to say,
is bare in the mind that we're in an indoor location here,
so nothing is unbreakable.
You can break U type locks or D type locks
using bottle jacks.
You can even get through them with angle grinders.
It's all about how much time, and how much noise it takes
to get through them.
So, you want to make it as difficult as possible
for a would be attacker to get to your bike.
If you got a chain on the floor for example,
you're going to be able to apply leverage
with bolt croppers to do that,
so you really don't want to have
any excessive locks on the floor.
You want to keep it all off the ground as much as possible
and it makes it much harder to work on them.
Now, heavy duty chain locks
are definitely the best for this type of job,
but you might also want to have a cable extension lock.
I'm going to chain all my bikes together,
and chain 'em to the ground,
but 'cause I've also got wheels and various other things,
I'm going to run this through the chains basically
and through all of the wheels,
so everything is locked together
to make it as hard as possible,
and I've got various locks here
and it' going to be pretty secure.
The final thing, just a reminder,
is if you're buying new locks for something like this,
make sure that you register the keys.
Make sure you split the keys up
so you've got a bunch of keys,
with single keys for each successive lock that you use
and you keep those together,
and you can keep your spare keys
somewhere completely separate and somewhere safe.
Keep them registered 'cause insurance companies
do like to know this sort of stuff.
As always, be careful with your bikes and your belongings.
Well there you go.
That fundamentally is how you install a ground anchor,
and hopefully you've had some advice on how to chain
your bikes up using one to maximize that security.
We've got a few more security videos
coming soon on GMBM Tech with far more information
about stuff like CCTV, bike locking up stuff,
locking your bike up in public.
So, keep an eye out for those videos.
In the mean time, for a couple more videos
click up here if you want to see
Blake Sampson's Mega Bike Check.
That is his Scout Hard Tail in rest Megavalanche,
and click down here to see how to look after your bike
and wash your bike if you live in an apartment.
As always, don't forge to give us a huge thumbs up here
at GMBN Tech, and if you like the content
don't forget to share and subscribe.
Cheers guys.