https://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...ediately-vomit



A man approaches a bicycle, handheld electric saw at the ready. He
powers it on, starts to drill, and is shot in the face with a noxious
spray that makes him vomit uncontrollably. This is the dream of the
inventors of SkunkLock.

“Basically we were fed up with thefts,” said Daniel Idzkowski from San
Francisco, one of the inventors of SkunkLock. “The real last straw was
we had a friend park his very expensive electric bike outside a Whole
Foods, and then went to have lunch and chat. We went out and his bike
was gone.”

Idzkowski’s friend had used two locks, each $120, whose inability to
stop a thief outraged him. “I blurted out, ‘why didn’t it blow his
balls off?’”
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He eventually landed on a less violent and more legal innovation. “I
realized there really is no solution to this problem,” he said. “The
biggest problem in this industry is that people don’t know that the
lock that they bought for $20 is absolutely worthless. It costs at
least $100 to have at least somewhere close to where you can at least
curb the chances of a thief wanting to steal your bike.”

With the right tools, Idzkowski said, a thief could cut through most
locks in less than a minute. Thieves, he said, “talk in seconds: a
15-second bike, a 20-second bike, and it goes up to 30-60-second
bikes, with Kryptonite locks that require two cuts, each about 25
seconds”.

With his co-inventor, Yves Perrenoud, Idzkowski created a U-shaped
lock of carbon and steel with a hollow chamber to hold one of three
pressurized gases of their own concoction, including one called
“formula D_1”. When someone cuts about 30% of the way into the lock,
Idzkowski said, the gas erupts in the direction of the gash.

“It’s pretty much immediately vomit inducing, causes difficulty
breathing,” Idzkowski said. “A lot of similar symptoms to pepper
spray.”

The inventors have not yet tested the device on an actual would-be
thief, but have tested it on themselves and volunteers at distances of
two feet (60cm), five feet, 10ft and 20ft. “At two feet it was pretty
bad. It was absolutely vomit inducing in 99% of people. At five feet
it’s very noticeable and the initial reaction is to move away from it.
At 10ft it’s definitely detectable and very unpleasant.”

Bike thieves have had virtually free rein around San Francisco and the
Bay area for years, stealing thousands every year, turning warehouses
and underpasses into chop shops, victimizing residents and city
officials alike. Last year the thefts prompted a 20/20 news segment,
and city police estimated that eight in 10 bikes in a chop shop are
stolen. Anecdotal evidence supports the statistics: on Thursday, a
Mission resident told the Guardian that thieves had recently strolled
into his garage and cut three bikes from their locks on the wall.

Idzkowski said their chemical had passed compliance tests and was
legal, and that its variants were designed to be compliant according
to the varying rules of 50 states, major cities and EU nations.

He admitted the lock was not foolproof. It could be picked, for
instance – and many bike locks can be picked with something as simple
as a cheap plastic pen. Idzkowski argued, though, that the widespread
use of advanced disc-cylinder tumbler locks, including in the
SkunkLock, meant it might take even skilled lockpicks up to half an
hour of tinkering – long enough to draw attention.

A thief could also simply return to the spent lock, though Idzkowski
insisted this would not be easy, because the noxious spray clings to
skin and clothing.

“You’re basically just puking on yourself the entire time,” he said.
“They could change all their clothes, shower, if the bike is still
there come out and cut the remaining 75% of the lock. You can’t
prevent a theft 100%, so that’s why we call it a deterrent lock, not a
solution.

“All you have to do is be better than the bike across the street.”

Like many Bay area entrepreneurs, the SkunkLock creators are
crowdfunding for their future. Pledging $99 to their Indiegogo fund
promises a customer their own SkunkLock in June 2017, pending risk
assessment by their legal team.

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