Dave Brown

The final end of the bodge

I’ve put quite a lot of effort into getting a satnav mounted onto my bike in the past, which was complicated by the fact that every piece of mounting equipment out there mounts onto the handlebars. Which, on my bike, are covered in plastic. What I eventually ended up doing was just slapping a bit of velcro on top of the headlight, and sticking the satnav to that.

The bike having recently been replaced with a newer one after some excitement a few months ago, I decided that if at all possible, I would try to find a non-bodge way of getting a satnav onto the bike. Preferably also no involving Velcro. So yesterday, I hopped onto #2 Industry Road, and went to a bike-goods store not too far away from me that happens to quite often have just the sort of thing I’m looking for when I go there.

I wasn’t disappointed this time either. I found one of these which is a bar bracket. It’s basically a little bit of handlebar that mounts in your mirror mounting, so that if your bike doesn’t make any handlebars available, you can make some extra for your purposes.

After puzzling out the dual-bolt arrangement for my mirrors (the top bolt, it turns out, holds the mirror on, while the bottom bolt holds the mirror assembly on), I got the thing in place, and it looks like this:

I also picked up an inexpensive generic mounting thing, because now that I have a bit of handlebar on my handlebars, inexpensive generic mounting things are actually available. It looks like this in place:

And with the satnav finally installed:

It finally doesn’t look like I’ve put a horrible hack into place. It almost looks as if it even belongs there.