Saturday, December 16, 2006

Revised my dash

One of my gripes with my ST has been a lack of good mounting points for gadgets. My xm radio and gps have been mounted on RAM arms attached to the mirror stalks, but I couldn't find any other places to cleanly put a RAM ball for my camera.

A couple of companies make expensive mounting products for the R1200ST, notably "The Gadget Guy" and Z-technik. They are nice, but I didn't like their lack of rubber-mounting and especially with "The Gadget Guy" mount, the need to spend even more money on base mounts.

A few months ago I noticed that Touratech had developed a gadget mount for the ST. It was amazingly cheap ($29.30!) and looked nice and clean. It was also labeled "backordered", which discouraged me from ordering.

I ordered the Touratech mount two weeks ago. To my surprise, I received notification that it had shipped only a week later. I installed it on the bike on Thursday night.



Of course, after spending only $30 on the mount, I wasn't about to go out and purchase Touratech's expensive mounting brackets, so I made do with some 1/2" conduit hangers that have been rattling around my "bits box" for a while. (The black stuff is a bicycle inner tube that I use as a convenient roll of rubber shims for anything that needs vibration damping or shielding between metal mounts)(I used fender washers to widen the base for my Quest gps mount)


Aaaaaaand with everything mounted up. The xm radio gets waterproofed 100% of the time because I can never tell when Texas will decide to let loose on me. The ziplock freezer bag is held on with a band of double sided velcro.




And now, with 2 RAM balls and all my RAM arms freed up, I can mount other really cool things!

1 comment:

Prof Wes said...

Cool mod, and useful too. I recently upgraded to a Garmin SP3 (I know, it's old, but it's newer than what I had!) and the guy gave it to me with one of those Touratech adapter thingies. Great idea on their part, reaching out to an under-rep'd market like that.