My Claud Butler bike was pinched last week. I opened the front door to find a bike-sized hole on our front verandah, and the bike cable, snipped, lying on the ground. I bought the bike in the UK, and spent many a happy hour on it riding the back roads of South Oxfordshire. Exploring the byways and bike paths of which there were many. My favourite was a 24 mile ride into Oxford, about half of which was on a very pretty bike path and the rest was on country laneways through pretty villages.
We had my bike shipped over to Australia with the rest of our stuff. It had a black frame with "Claud Butler" in big white writing down the frame. It looked quite flash, which was probably why it was targeted by the bike thieves. Everyone has bikes chained to their verandahs in these parts. I had toyed with the idea of daggifying the bike by spray painting the frame, but never got around to it.
The security cable that secured Claud Butler to my verandah had been a cheapie. But it looked quite hefty and strong, so I trusted it. But when I saw the snipped cable, I realised that it was the outer plastic sheath that was hefty, and the actual cable hidden inside the sheath was not very thick at all.
I liked my bike, and I'll miss it, but the next day, a chap who lives next door gave me a bike he found on a hard-rubbish collection. I think his ex wife or ex girlfriend spotted it on a throw-out pile and couldn't bear to see such a perfectly good looking bike going to waste. So the chap cleaned it up a bit and chained it to the stack of unridden bikes on his verandah. That was probably years ago, and he was keen for it to find a good home to justify the effort.
It certainly has found a good home. It has 26 inch wheels which were fitted with very fat knobbly tyres. I replaced those with normal ones (puncture proof too, or at least extremely puncture resistant.) I purchased a Krypton D lock and I was back on the road in no time. I like the new bike. The gears are smooth, and I like the fact that it's a smaller bike. It's easier to throw around when you're negotiating traffic-intense situations. And also it's thief resistant and not just because of the Krypton D lock. It's a bike that not many bike thieves would want to steal.
