Hiplok D1000 Anti-Angle Grinder Bike Lock

The Hiplok D1000 is a beast of a lock, Diamond rated for insurance purposes and with a very well-thought-out collection of accessories and third-party brand partnerships for securing bikes at home, at work and for carrying on your bike. At £250 it’s also relatively expensive for the protection rating – but what price protecting your ride? Beyond ‘heavy’ and ‘secure’, the value to consumers will come down to the sum of the ecosystem surrounding the D1000 itself.

> Buy now: Hiplok D1000 for £124.99 from Helmet City

If you’re looking at this review, chances are you’re worried about theft firstly, insurance secondly. Safe to say having been Diamond rated through exhaustive insurance industry tests, the D1000 is an excellent lock in itself. You can dance on the head of a pin re anti-angle grinder or lock-picking features, but fundamentally if someone tries to nick your bike it will take them a very long, noisy, sparks-flying time, and if it gets nicked there shouldn’t be any quibbles over your insurance claim.

In the official road.cc Lock Torture Test the Hiplok D1000 fared very well. Bolt cutter jaws were not wide enough to fit around its bulky body, and the angle grinder disc fully disintegrated after 1 minute 15 seconds. In the words of our proto-thief Dodgy Dave: “We were beginning to make an impact…but nowhere near enough. It would have taken us a lot longer to get through.”

These test results are pretty much on a par with the other locks in the £150-plus price range – all of which survived both the bolt cutter and angle grinder tests. The £149.99 Litelok X1 was the cheapest lock to survive both tests.

> Which type of lock is best for your bike?

So far, so Diamond-rated secure. The rest of this review focuses on liveability – that is, how easy the D1000 is to carry and use day to day.

Living with the D1000

The D1000 unlocks and locks easily, with the keyhole covered by a substantial rubber plug. The whole of the outside is covered in a thick, grippy rubber so as not to damage your paintwork or cause noise banging against other things in a bag or pannier.

The internal ‘locking dimensions’ of 155x92mm are smaller than a typical D-lock, meaning the D1000 is more resistant to ‘leverage’ attacks – think long crowbar. But this smaller size meant the D1000 was not able to be secured around the battery down tube of a Cube Kathmandu step-through e-bike. It did fit around the battery down tubes of my Decathlon Stilus and Mondraker Chaser e-mountain bikes. Of course, it will fit around chainstays and seatstays, and thinner top tubes. If your security regime relies one hundred per cent on passing your lock over a tube thicker than 155mm, you might look at the D1000’s larger sibling, the DX1000, with its 112x205mm locking area (£299, 2.6kg).

Typically, once around a battery-inside e-bike tube you get about two wrists’ worth of space left to fit in whatever you’re locking it to. If you’re locking around a rear stay, that spare space increases.

A point of note if you’re locking up a mountain bike by the rear stays – don’t use an area of the bike where a simple 5mm hex key could undo a suspension bearing bolt in a few seconds and have it pivoted out of the way… allowing the bike to be unthreaded from your very secure lock. I’ve seen very expensive bikes locked this way, where a suspension-savvy thief could be away in a few minutes with no noise or damage to the bike at all, leaving your still-locked and unharmed D-lock behind while you think up how you’re going to frame this to your immediately sceptical insurer.

Suffice to say, the D1000 is easy to open and close, doesn’t damage your frame, has a lifetime warranty and spare keys are available (it comes with three).

Portability

A super-secure (portable) lock is only of worth if you have it on you to use, and here the Hiplok D1000 shines with an excellent range of accessories to schlep your lock around.

My favourite, and the most universal, is the £30 Carry Pouch. The pouch is made from a water-repellent, tough material with a bright orange lining. The flap is held down by a thick Velcro patch. The magic is on the back, where four thick nylon straps are sewn on, making for no fewer than 12 loops through which the four provided Velcro straps can be looped. You get three short straps and one long, meaning it’s possible to choose from 12,554,388* different combinations of fastening to your bike, pannier, rack or handlebar.

Each strap has a plastic ‘D’ at the end to allow it to loop back – also meaning you can daisy-chain the straps to make them longer, to go around a battery down tube on an e-bike, for example.

The D1000 Carry Pouch is such a nifty bit of kit that I’d recommend it for any D-lock that can fit – mindful that ‘full-size’ D-locks like the Litelok X1 are too long for it to close over.

My favourite way of mounting the Carry Pouch is either side of the frame, just behind the head tube. This is mostly unused – but very usable – space. Anything there is forward enough of your knees, doesn’t foul any cables or your bar when turned, and doesn’t affect handling. There’s usually nothing else there, unlike on your bar where you’ll likely have a light, computer, basket or whatever, not to mention a bird’s nest of cables.

The only downside of the Carry Pouch is that you can’t lock it to your bike – I suppose you could zip-tie the hell out of it if you really wanted to. The three Velcro straps mean if you were concerned, removing and taking it with you isn’t that much of a chore, or if it did get stolen it’s only £30 to replace.

Hiplok does a simple padded and zipped sleeve for £25, which keeps your lock and other contents separate when put into a bag or other space. Personally I’d pay the extra £5 and get the Carry Pouch – you can remove the Velcro straps for a sleeker experience, and then have the option of strapping to a bike if needed.

Finally, there’s the £25 BR1000 bracket. This works with both the D1000 and the larger DX1000, and is a joy to use. It weighs 196g and the clever design means it will work both on a traditional pannier rack or a more modern rack with a pannier adapter, like the Aeroe Spider system. You need a clear 95mm of tubing to fit the bracket. The clamp is adjustable to accommodate different thicknesses of tubing, and you get two reusable zip-ties to attach it to the lower portion of the rack to stop any flapping.

The D1000 fits easily and quickly to the bracket and is held in place by a single fat rubber strap that’s easy to manage with gloves on.

The one and only gripe I have with the bracket isn’t the bracket per se, it’s the locking end of the lock itself. There’s a small amount of play in the two halves of the lock once secured, which can translate into a metal-on-metal rattle over rough surfaces. This can be largely mitigated by attaching the D1000 to the bracket with the locking end hard up against the bracket instead of being perfectly centred as Hiplok advises. Not a huge problem, but in a £250 product, one that should be sorted. If you have a rattly D1000, a few layers of insulation tape around the prongs quietens things down considerably.

The party trick of the BR1000 bracket is in Hiplok’s partnership with German brands Klickfix and Ortlieb. Ortlieb makes four handlebar adaptors that the BR1000 works with, and Klickfix makes seven. Both brands do lockable options, which means your BR1000 can’t be nicked.

Klickfix goes further, with another seven fixtures for bike stems, frame tubes and even seatposts. Klickfix also does oversize handlebar adaptors, allowing you to fit its bracket to 35mm bars – which are increasingly common on e-bikes and hybrids.

Using the BR1000 bracket with a Klickfix adaptor is a genuinely pleasing inter-brand operability customer experience that you’d wish the whole of the bike industry could replicate. It makes the choice of schlepping your D1000 lock a joy, attaching with literally a click, and removing just as fast when the bracket’s no longer needed. You leave the BR1000 attached to the lock when fitting and removing to the Klickfix bracket. Having the 2kg D1000 on your handlebar isn’t much of an issue, as the mass is close to the steerer tube and so has little effect on handling.

In addition to these carrying accessories, Hiplok has a whole ecosystem of Diamond-rated floor and wall anchors of varying sizes and features that you can use to lock your bike and D1000 to. They are all reassuringly expensive – the AX1000 anchor and arm is £350. You can get the D1000 and AX1000 as a bundle for £550, saving £50.

Weights & measures

Weighing in on the road.cc Scales of Truth at 2,033g, the D1000 is 286g heavier than its closest competitor, the Litelok X1. The X1 is svelter and physically longer and wider, giving it a larger ‘internal’ locking space than the D1000, meaning there’s more space inside the lock to fit your bike frame and whatever you’re locking it to – a bike rack, signpost, railing and so on (also more space for a leverage attack, if that matters). It’s also £100 cheaper than the D1000 – both strong arguments for the X1.

But the £20 Litelok Tactical Mount is limited in the available mounting positions on your bike. It can’t be mounted to handlebars or panniers, so basically it’s only good for larger, traditional-framed bikes with tubes of 23-63mm diameter. Anything with suspension gubbins, bottle cages or of a small size is unlikely to fit the Litelok mount. On my Sonder Camino in size XL, it only just fits alongside two 750ml bottles. A smaller frame would lose one or both bottles – mind you, how likely you are to be on a ride needing a D-lock AND two large bottles is moot.

> How to properly secure your bike in a shed or garage

If you have a step-through frame bike then it’s likely not an option, as assuming your seat tube was the right size and shape, the lock would block the bit you step through. The afore-to-described Hiplok mounting options as afforded by the Carry Pouch or bracket are more comprehensive and better thought out.

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Top of the pile?

Of the other Diamond-rated options road.cc has tested recently, Hiplok stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the ecosystem and thinking behind the mounts and pouches. The Abus Granit Super Extreme 2500 has a pannier mount, and I’ve covered the Litelok Tactical Mount’s shortcomings. The rest don’t offer a way of securing your lock to your bike, rather relying on you having a bag or pannier handy.

Once you’ve gotten past the fact that they’re all Diamond rated, weigh around 2kg and are Large Things, it’s down to how you transport them. If you plan to use a backpack or pannier this isn’t an issue – and the extra £100 for the D1000 over the Litelok X1 is a hard ask to justify. But if you need a way to quickly and easily travel with your lock, and be able to quickly remove and attach it to your bike in seconds, the Hiplok D1000 and associated Carry Pouch and/or BR1000 bracket are excellent choices.

> Buy now: Hiplok D1000 for £124.99 from Helmet City

* Prove me wrong. Dare ya.

Verdict

Excellent lock, with many options for carrying on your bike and securing to your house or workplace

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