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hexlock anti-theft system
published in 1516 in latin, thomas more's utopia depicted an island of the same name playing home to a society that effectively predated theoretical communism. the island of utopia contained a total of 54 cities, each divided into four equal parts. each of those cities featured 6000 households consisting of between ten and 16 adults. groups of thirty households are banded together for the purpose of electing a syphograntus and in turn, every ten syphogranti elect a traniborus.
now, before this gets sillier than it probably already is, allow me to get a tad closer to my ultimate point.
more's utopia was/is in effect, a work of satirical fiction, the description of which was reminsicent of life in a monastical order. his fictional inventions read as close to idyllic, where a perfectly ordered society would survive and prosper, each individual doing so in direct proportion to their directed effort. for instance, there was no private property, goods being stored in warehouses with each requesting that which they need. there are no locks on the doors of the houses, each of which is rotated every ten years. agriculture is the most important undertaking, with each member of the population required to work the land, both men and women, for two years at a time.
in short, it sounds too good to be true and to be honest, it is. and the reason for that is the introduction of real people. inequality is a prominent feature of modern society, the existence of which is entirely due to each person's perceived worth and region of domicile. i could no doubt earn a great deal more for my photoshop skills if i lived in the big city and there will always be a ceo who reckons last year's remuneration of £several million scarcely paid justice to the two days a month work he had to endure to earn it.
in short, everything works just fine in theory until you add human beings to the equation.
and that's precisely the situation that occurred as i commenced my review of the hexlox anti-theft system. the principle behind this simple system revolves around the placing of a magnetic insert inside the head of a steel allen, or hex bolt. so doing renders the bolt immune to the unwanted ministrations of a thief with an allen key. a magnet on the base of the insert makes it all but impossible to remove without the necessary key provided at the point of purchase. these bear a three-digit code to ensure that another hexlox owner can't nip along and pinch any of your bicycle's desirable components.
all this can be applied to quick-release skewers, seatpin clamps, wheelnuts and pretty much anything else that fastens by means of a steel hex bolt. and should your bicycle be favoured with alloy or titanium versions, it's possible to purchase inserts for those which allow use of the hexbolt system. once again, it all sounds too good to be true and once again, that turned out to be the case. for just like thomas more's utopia, introduce a slightly inept indvidual (yours truly) into the equation and it's possible for it all to go horribly wrong.
in the process of placing the appropriately sized insert into the supplied seatpin bolt, i contrived to knock the insert sideways at which point it jammed fast, resisting all subsequent efforts to remove it. thankfully, at the point during which my ineptitude transpired, the seatpin clamp bolt was not fitted to the bicycle, otherwise i would currently be the owner of a colnago master in which the seatpin was now either irremoveable or unable to be tightened via a bolt which it would be impossible to remove from the clamp. definitely not the situation in which you want to find yourself far from home.
i have no intention of trying to defend my stupidity; i really should have been paying a tad more attention than was obviously the case. hexlox is a clever, simple and affordable anti-theft system that, 99.9% of the time, will provide the service for which it was purchased. but introduce one idiot and all those years of research and development evaporate into the ether. statistical analysis will determine whether it's worth putting in a few more hours of r&d to head off the idiots at the pass. if you buy into this, and i do receommend tat you do, just be more careful than i was.
hexlox cycle bolt anti-theft system
monday 31 july 2017
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