Fix for Broken Mirror Mounts
Yes we all do it sometimes! We break our bike mirrors. I'm not talking about the mirror itself, I'm talking about the plastic clip or clamp that holds it securely to your handlebars. When it breaks, it is bad because they are very handy to you when a road train sneaks up behind you, or those cars that drift off of the edge of the road for some freaky reason.
Article submitted by Crank
Since I use my bike for every day use, I seem to break a lot of them whether they are cheap or very well made mirrors. After a long ride, I came home with a good idea for putting the ever increasing pile of broken mirrors back into use.
After visting a hardware store and getting a few plastic vice clamps, and some small screws I've managed to fix the problem by coming up with a new design. These are the type of clamps I came home with.
New Clamp for the mirror.
The mirror and the new clamp.
I started out by getting one of my many broken mirrors. What I was aiming for was a mirror that would have less chance of getting broken, plus a mirror that I could move around in a blink of an eye with minimal fuss. I ended up using one of my flexy mirrors. The first step was to cut the end of the broken mount on the mirror. I then placed the long flexy part of the mirror arm inside the clamp handle which was a snug fit. After drilling two holes through the handle and the flexy part of the mirror to hold it all together, I came up with my first mirror with a better mounting system.
New clamp fitted to the broken mirror mount.
The easy part was finding a place to mount it. After a week with it on, and going for rides, shopping, work I found this idea for me was great, and I was able to move the mirror anywhere on the handle bars or bar ends of the bike. When the mirror came in contact with an object, with this modification there was no breakage. All what happened was that the mirror spun around. Here is a few photographs of different mountings.
New clamp allows the mirror the be clamped to the end of the bars.
The mirror can be clamped anywhere, including the top of a bar end.
I know you would not be able to do this with all the mirrors that are on the market but a majority of them would lend themselves to this modification. By now there is hopefully something out there similiar to my design and if there is I would like to know. Here is some more interesting notes about mirrors that I found on the web - Notes on Mirrors and Bikes. (external link)
