I bought some of these (in blue) a few weeks back,

http://www.richbrook.co.uk/pages/wheelvalvecaps.html

I was quite please with the subtle but effective look they give my car (also in blue) especially when clean.

The 'anti-theft' design is beneficial but I did doubt their true resilience and unfortunately I was proven wrong as one of the caps was obviously stolen by some **** last weekend. The strange thing is that they only took one of them. Whether that's due to lack of skill, time or something else I don't know but I should be grateful for that at least. My problem now is that I want to get hold of just one of these caps to replace it with and I wondered if I can get a 'single' cap rather than another set of four.

If not, has anybody had any experience with this kind of product and are there any other preventative measures that could be taken to stop this from happening again?

Are you sure it was stolen? Could it have come off?

Preventative? Probably not. Its usually kids stealing them for their bikes. I have lost several sets. My best measure was to put a small piece of black PVC tape at the base of the valve cap. It does just enough to make it harder to remove. That works for me

I have some anti-theft ones on mine, but I did them up with a socket, and the valve started spinning in the wheel before I could get really decent tightness on them, and then I could undo them by hand anyway.... Oh well.

Hmmmm, I had a set of the richbrook spinning valve caps and was really happy with them until they got wet and began to stop spinning... then some kids (or max-power oiks) decided to nick them:mad: the best thing was they went round the car and one of the caps still spun so they only got three:rolleyes: At this point I decided to pop into Halfords and splash some cash on some 99p black plastic ones and cut my losses. You are right though, they do look good!

Coat them with Iodine, doesn't stop them from getting stolen but the little sods get black fingers.

Thanks for the ideas and comments guys. I had wondered if the cap had just fallen off but since it had been a few weeks since I washed my car, a thin layer of brake dust had built up on the wheels and I could see finger marks around the edges where the valve cap was i.e manual removal.

I have since contacted the place I bought them from and they have kindly offered to let me buy replacement caps at £2.50 each inc P&P which is not too bad. In the mean time I have kept the original black caps on.

im sick of em getting nicked so ive stuck all the black ones back on