Shop got broken into

dartcuda said
Thanks guys, and sorry to hear some of you have been hit too...Theft is on the rise here too, and with scrape price going up the way they are we have had a lot of cooper wire stole in my area. The word is there is a band of people who are going around the state and hitting place.....I think they plan it out and hit when they know it is safe and they will have some time to get what they want. I took some pictures of the path they took. What they did was parked over at the school behind the shop, came through the garden area, tore boards off the fence we have around the shop and cars, then came around to the front door and cut the lock.Once inside they went through everything, still finding more stuff missing. They then took the bolts out of the chains we have on the big doors that we use to lock them... Tehy even used my buddys wheel barral to transfer everything back to the school to their car.My DArt is outside in a portable garage to the left in the pic of all the cars....It doesn't seem that they touched the Cuda wich is right next to the dart in it's own portable garage...

Clean that place up, cut the brush out, move the cars in neat rows with lots of spacing around so that it's hard to hide behind any one of them and put up some lights and motion lights. You can also buy at harbor freight some cheap cameras, and motion alarms. If you hook up a few like you would have at the end of your driveway with the reflector beams going different ways, then hook the loud end to a siren, even a cat will set off the audible outside alarm and scare them off. I'll bet you can build your own system there for less than $500. It will be crude but effective. Another option is to plant Osage Orange trees around the fence line if they will grow in your area. Keep them to the ground every early spring and they will grow about 12 feet a year with long green branches out of the ground that have 1 inch stiff thorns on them. Farmers use them for natural fence line to keep cattle in an area. They are brutal.
Around here the scrap theft isn't as bad, but it does happen. I have some aluminum gutters in the back of a truck at my moms house that haven't been touched, bt at the same time someone tried to steal gas from her Neon a few weeks ago. To show how stupid they were, there was a 72 T-bird in the other driveway, backed up to the garage so it would be easy to hide and a pickup truck next to that with a gas can underneath it. They didn't touch those.
I had some kids rifle through my van last Sunday night too. They got about $6 in cash and coins. Some other neighbors lost more. It was unlocked so bad me but I'll be watching and no police will be involved if I catch them, we will just go for a long ride.