The SkunkLock is a new crowd-funded bike lock that will protect your bike in an unusual interesting way. If you approach a bike and start to saw away at the lock, you’ll be shot in the face with a grim spray that’ll make you vomit uncontrollably. Nice.
Daniel Idzkowski from San Fransisco invented the appropriately named SkunkLock, and told the Guardian, “Basically we were fed up with thefts. 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.”
His friend had used two bike locks worth $120 each, causing Idzkowski to blurt out, “why didn’t it blow his balls off?”
With his co-inventor Yves Perrenoud, Idzkowski came up with a D-shaped lock made up of carbon and steel that has a hollow chamber to hold one of three pressurised smelly gasses in it. They created the gasses themselves, including one called “formula D_1”, and they’re all legal. The gas erupts in the direction of the cut into the metal, when someone has cut 30% of the way into the lock.
Idzowski said, “It’s pretty much immediately vomit inducing and causes difficulty breathing,” Idzkowski said. “A lot of similar symptoms to pepper spray.”
The device is yet to be tested on an actual theif, but the inventores have tested it on themselves and unfortunate volunteers at distances of two feet, 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.”
The device is currently being crowdfunded over at Indiegogo, where a $99 donation promises a customer their own lock in June 2017, as long as it’s deemed good for the go-ahead by their legal team.