There are many ways bike thieves can break even the most secure locks. Any lock can be picked, but most bike thieves opt for a less subtle, brute force technique. This includes using long poles for leverage, hand tools like tin snips and bolt cutters to cut small to medium locks, and power tools like Dremels and cordless angle grinders to quickly remove high-security locks. Some thieves may be able to pick locks and we are certain from the Lock Picking Lawyers YouTube videos that all the locks can likely be picked by an expert, but brute force attacks are much more common.
For the locks in this test, we used a progression of small, inexpensive hand tools up to cordless power tools to see how quickly they could be broken. Starting with a small set of hand shears, moving on to a larger set of 24” bolt cutters, then going to an angle grinder with a 4.5” metal cut-off wheel, which was able to get through all the locks. Some locks like the OnGuard Brute 8001 STD and Litelok X1 Armoured Barronium wore the cutting wheels out very quickly, the latter taking more than two wheels to make the two cuts required to open the lock.