Since the harder a lock is the more difficult it is to cut, does anyone know if anyone has tried to coat lock shackles and/or bodies with a very thin layer of say tungsten or titanium carbide, or some other super-hard material? A thin coating makes it very difficult to penetrate with even the *best* cutting tools, and the interior is high-quality steel which isn't so brittle and expensive. Speaking of which, how much would such a superlock cost?
Later, Nelson Chen __o Same road Boycott Wal-Mart, union-buster. _`\<,_ Same rights (_)/ (_) Same rules
Since the harder a lock is the more difficult it is to cut, does anyone know if anyone has tried to coat lock shackles and/or bodies with a very thin layer of say tungsten or titanium carbide, or some other super-hard material?
A ceramic coating of that sort would likely spall and chip away from the area being cut.
This general principle has already been employed in a simpler way, with carburizing, aka "case hardening" of steel. A process employing heat and a carbon-rich, oxygen-starved enclosure results in a cortex of very hard material over a core of tougher steel.
Though I don't know of any specifically, I would expect that some existing U-locks use carburized shackles.
Since the harder a lock is the more difficult it is to cut, does anyone know if anyone has tried to coat lock shackles and/or bodies with a very thin layer of say tungsten or titanium carbide, or some other super-hard material? A thin coating makes it very difficult to penetrate with even the *best* cutting tools, and the interior is high-quality steel which isn't so brittle and expensive. Speaking of which, how much would such a superlock cost?
As of the last time I looked into this (for a different purpose), carbides in general can't be deposited, they have to be formed and then soldered in place. Machining a thin shell to fit the shape of a U-lock's shackle would be a time-intensive task. You're talking about an end product that's likely to be high into three figures, if not four, either in US dollars or Euros. For that expenditure, you would gain increased resistance to some common cutting tools. Since that's not the method employed in the vast majority of U-lock-defeating attacks, and since the carbide shell would add little or nothing to the shackle's ability to resist leverage attacks, the increased cost would produce little benefit.
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