This disc lock might be the best security for your motorcycle.

Little can put as big a hole in your day like exiting your favourite restaurant, pub or your girlfriend’s house only to find the spot that once held your two-wheeled pride and joy bereft of motorcycle. I had a Yamaha RD350 stolen many years ago and it still haunts me. 

Hence why to this day, I always carry a disc lock, and why my garage has the mother of all security systems. Combining a steel beam that goes right through the door and a monster pad lock: If someone wants my bike, they’re going to have to saw a big hole through my two-layered door, a process I pray pisses off the neighbours so much they call the cops. 

But that only works at home. 

What to do when you’re out and about? The truly paranoid, of course, carry around a big chain everywhere so they can hitch their prized two-wheeler to some immovable object. Plenty of companies — Abus, Oxford and more —make some hefty chains made of hardened steel, the links often of odd shape (hexagonal seems popular). They are extremely robust, but they’re also the height of inconvenience; big, bulky and exceedingly unwieldy, they are difficult to carry around, take up way too much room in your luggage and are positively ungainly to bungie to your luggage rack. They do the job, but they are the opposite of convenient.

You could fit an alarm, but in my experience, their pitiful bleets don’t attract nearly the attention we think they do, rendering them nigh on useless. You could also fit some form of tracker, but that just tells you where your bike is after it’s been stolen. And, if anecdotal reports of police forces ignoring the information sent from tracking systems is any indication, knowing where your bike is doesn’t mean anyone is going to go get it.

Much easier and more effective, then, is to wield the ever-popular disc lock. They come in all manner of shapes and sizes, but their intent and basic operation is always the same. Using retractable pins, they all lock to the front disc brake itself and thus prevent the wheel from rotating. Oh, depending on where you lock it on the disc — say right at the bottom where it’s easily accessible for removal — the wheel can rotate as much as 120 degrees before it hits the front fork, fender or caliper, but, after that, it’s immobilized. And there are some seriously sturdy versions that are fairly impervious to destruction.

That said, they have a couple of issues. First off, the fact the wheel can still rotate a little has caused owners some tense — and sometimes costly — moments. Forget that you installed the lock on your disc, for instance, and, if you did try to ride away, a traditional disc lock would allow you to gain just enough momentum that some serious damage could occur when the lock hits the aforementioned fender or fork or caliper. You might even topple over, resulting in even more broken bits.

And they can be defeated. The locks themselves are often robust enough to resist attack from hammer and other tools of lock destruction, but enterprising thieves just take an angle grinder and slice through the part of the disc that has the lock through it. Then they can simply wheel the motorcycle away with, obviously, one destroyed-but-
easily-replaceable brake disc. 

Enter the Roadlok. It uses the same general principle as a disc lock — i.e. a pin is placed through the brake disc preventing the wheel from turning — but it has few of its foibles. It’s also much more convenient to use and the part that gets inserted through the discs is much smaller, so it’s easier to carry. Here’s how it works:

A frame is bolted atop the right-side brake caliper that runs all the way down underneath the brake disc. At its end, there is both a lock and a cylinder through which you insert the immobilizing pin. Said immobilizing pin is spring-loaded, so that when it meets one of the cooling holes machined into pretty much every modern motorcycle brake disc, it pops right in, locking the motorcycle in place. 

The advantages are manifold. For one thing, rather than having to carry around a heavy lock, the only movable piece is the immobilizing pin and the small piston it’s housed in; unlike a traditional disc lock, you could put it in your pocket and not even notice it. And lastly, since the spring-loaded pin injects itself into the first hole it sees — usually within 10-degrees of wheel rotation — there’s no chance of damaging precious parts.

It’s also better at theft protection. For one thing, since the pin is locked very near the brake calipers and fork, there’s no way to slice out the portion of the disc that the pin has engaged as you can with a traditional disc lock. For another, more ambitious types than I have tried attacking both the pin and the long mounting arm with everything from hammers to disc grinders and, while not totally indestructible, getting the better of the Roadlok appears to be extremely frustrating. 

Even the obvious — unbolting the mounting bracket from the brake calipers — doesn’t gain you much: Since the pin is so snuggly ensconced in its hole in the disc, even with its mounting bolts removed, the mounting bracket is so tight to the calipers that it’s tough to lever away. And, even if you could, the pin is still locked in the disc, so you’ll still have to slice apart the brake disc. Indeed, the only way to get the bike rolling is to slice the mounting bracket, rotate the wheel so the immobilizing pin is in open territory and then slice out that portion of the brake disc with the pin. That’s going to take some time and, along with their lack of moral direction, motorcycle thieves are not known for their patience. Not only is the Roadlok lightweight, but it’s also one of the most effective motorcycle anti-theft devices going.

It’s also phenomenally easy to use. After parking the bike, simply unlock the plastic blanking device that prevents dirt from getting in the pin cylinder while you’re riding and then slip in the pin/piston combo. Since it’s unlikely that it’s right over the hole in the disc it’s going to pierce, you may have to move the bike a few inches before you hear the satisfying click that the pin is in position. And, when you’re unlocking the bike; if the bike moved at all the pin might be lodged into said hole in the disc so tightly that you might need to wiggle the wheel a few millimetres either way before it pops out. But other than that, it’s phenomenally easy to use.

It is a little trickier to mount, however. Since the hole in the brake disc must be in exactly the right spot for the pin to enter, the mounting bracket has to be exactingly placed. Roadlok provides two different lengths of mounting bolts (they’ll replace the OEM caliper-mounting bolts) and a whole slew of different size spacers to ensure you can place the pin precisely. The procedure is also made easier, since Roadlok provides listings of spacers and bolts that work on many popular motorcycles. 

That said, I had replaced my brakes discs with some aftermarket bits, which means their cooling holes were in different place, meaning the recommended spacer/bolt combo would not work on my bike. Nonetheless, it took me less than 20 minutes and a little math to figure things out. Roadlok even includes a little card-sized template to help facilitate placement.

The Roadlok will fit pretty much any motorcycle with radial brake calipers. It also comes in a variety of colours — red, black and gold as well as orange for KTMs specifically — and you can buy everything from spare keys and pins to dust caps and complete bolt and spacer kits. It’s easy to use, not so difficult to install and indestructible enough that all but the most industrious of lowlifes will move on to easier prey. It’s not cheap at US$239.99 — plus US$19.99 for shipping — but I do sleep better when my precious V-Strom is at its most vulnerable.

Check it out at roadlok.com.