OK, so some miscreant scum broke in to my buildings last night and had it away with a motorcycle and a load of tools. The bike was my Honda CBR400RR reg E93NOU - a rare bike, the actual one being the one in the attached photo. Please keep eyes peeled and if anybody happens across it please let me know - reward offered for it's safe return.
I wouldn't normally cover such a thing on en engineering / blokey man cave style blog but as the police are entirely 100 per cent useless I feel compelled to have to do something myself to try and get this bike back. It's inconvenient and expensive to lose all the tools but to lose this particular bike is beyond upsetting.
I discovered the burglary at about 09.45 on a Sunday morning, I phoned 101, was advised of a 1 hour wait so I phoned 999 instead. They refused to handle the call, saying I should go back to 101. The advised wait time was now over 1 hour so I thought while I was on hold I would start filling out an on line report to see which would be quicker - after all I didn't want to waste time, I had to secure my buildings etc. I gave up trying to fill out the form on line, my ethnicity seemed too be more important than retails of the items stolen. After God knows how long I got to speak to somebody and details were taken. Sadly that took an age and the mobile signal dropped, meaning I had to phone back and again had an hour wait. So after about 2 1/2 hours the report was finally in and an officer could be dispatched, if only they had one. In fact, they didn't find one at all until nearly 24 hours after I had initially made the call.
Two female officers turned up, very nice they were but sadly I don't think they hold out any hope of getting anything back and to be honest I don't think they are even going to try. The reason I believe that is that at no point has anybody given me an email address or anything else so that I can send them photos. I don't suppose for one minute that 99 per cent of officers even know what a cbr400rr even looks like. They only took the vaguest of descriptions of the tools, they have probably already been sold at a car boot sale anyway.
A far shorter call was made to my insurance company, they wouldn't even talk to me and directed me to an on line chat. It took them a matter of minutes to dismiss the claim on the grounds that no damage was done to the buildings to gain entry. It's right there in the small print but not in any of the sales messages where they tell you what a great level of cover they offer.
The police response was beyond pathetic from start to finish, any witness hearing that a hold time is an hour is not going to hold that long to report what they have seen. The criminals know this and act without fear. They know they won't get caught, they are at it day after day after day. Some Romanians got spotted stealing cooking oil a few weeks back, the same van appeared on social media several times over several incidents nothing happened except for some of the posts being removed for racist content.
No doubt the number plate has been removed as an absolute minimum, the bike is now either in bits or in a container with many others. This was not a one off, they came equipped, in a van, clearly more than one person, they had at least bolt cutters. They have generally speaking taken all the most valuable stuff, they did it very quietly, even the dog slept through it. They avoided the security lights, They came in through the gate furthest from the house. Obviously security has now been massively increased, at least we learnt a few lessons from this. The cost is high, the emotional drain far higher.
I have written this for two reasons - first is an attempt to get my bike back, the second is in the hope that folk will read it and make sure they do all they can to secure their property. You are on your own, the police really only care about issuing fines anything else brings them out in a rash. The other thing I would say is that we had 8 padlocks cut off with bolt cutters, the only 2 they did not cut off were the disc type locks. We now have these types of locks on everything, you cant get the jaws of a bolt cutter far enough on them to get the leverage to cut them. Sure, they could use an angle grinder but they are noisy and create lots of sparks. Get the biggest ones that you can because they have the largest diameter locking piece, make sure it is hardened.
Note the damage to the top of the tail tidy, it's one of the few distinguishing marks on the bike. It's also unusual in that it has the speed light on it, most of these got removed.
This is the video I have of the fazer. https://www.youtu
Add comment
Comments