Another Yankee Engineering Project

So once again the outrageous price of manufactured goods has led me to seek a homemade alternative to preserve not only my hard earned money but, more importantly, my few remaining shreds of dignity. Recently I ordered a pretty high end handlebar-mounted light for my mountain bike so that I could continue to ride after work even in spite of the rapidly diminishing daylight. I had an older, far less impressive light laying around that I decided I wanted to mount on my helmet to provide me light when turning my head to look at things that don’t fall within my new light’s forward facing beam. This is not an odd application, so plenty of manufacturers make mounts that allow you to afix a handlebar light to your helmet. However, a mount like this goes for around $35! If you look at the mount, it’s nothing more than a piece of plastic and Velcro!

Any idiot with two brain cells to rub together could make a far less expensive mount and still have days to spare before their mail order mount would even show up at their house. Luckily, I am just the idiot for the job. With the $4.32 worth of parts pictured below, and about 25 minutes of time, I was able to construct this nifty little mount. Sure, it’s not quite as pretty as the one here, but by virtue of the fact that it’s built to hold its own source of illumination, it begs the deep philosophical question – “if an ugly mount serves to secure the only light by which you would recognize the mount for its ugliness, then is the mount even ugly in the first place?”. Well, yeah, sure it is…but I saved 30 bucks.