A down and dirty GoPro Magnetic Mount… almost.

Sometimes you get an idea from totally unrelated circumstances. While I was thinking about loading up the FZ1 for my trip this past weekend, inspiration hit me for a camera mount that I could use for my racing Ninja. To be fair the seed of the idea was planted when I was checking out GoPro mounts in the local big box electronics store. It was a magnetic mount with an American 25 cent coin sized magnet. I thought it was brilliant, but for $10 I thought I could do something cheaper. After looking in my GoPro box and other random bins of stuff, I came up with the following experiment. Scroll down to see how it went.

These were the parts I used. The main piece being the 4" round, magnetic, stainless steel parts tray at the top of the pic. I got this particular one from a Japanese dollar store, but you can get these at Harbor Freight for free with a coupon. The other pieces are from left to right a GoPro flat sticky mount and clip, two mounting arms (1 tall, 1 short), three thumb screws and of course one of my GoPro Hero 3's. The mounting arms allow me to get two axis of tilt that along with the ability of the camera to tilt and the base to rotate gives me almost unlimited ability to adjust the camera position.

Here you can see the mount assembled with the camera. I have the short mounting arm attached to the GoPro clip. The long arm was attached between the short one and the camera. There are three joints in this system for adjustment forward and back two ways and side-to-side one way. You could get some different adjustability at the base by switching the long and the short mounting arms as well as replacing the clip with the GoPro J-Buckle clip for more articulation.

Not much going on with these two pics. The top pic is just where I stuck the flat mount to the parts tray. I should have cheated it closer to one side as I had trouble sliding the clip into the flat mount due to the curved sides of the tray. The bottom pic is just me testing whether or not I could still use the tray as a magnetic parts tray with the GoPro stuff stuck in it. The test proved successful so I went on to mounting the whole thing to see if my experiment worked.

And it did, mostly. In the pic above I stuck the whole set up on the Ninja's tank. Here is where it went wrong. The tank is curved in multiple angles and with the extra leverage of the camera sticking up makes the whole thing a bit wobbly. I tried the mount on both the Ninja and the FZ and could only get a few locations where I would be comfortable riding with the camera mounted to the bike. Any position where the camera was sticking out sideways pulled the tray down so much that while it was still sticking to the tank, would probably fall off at the first bump.

While I ultimately wasn't successful, the experiment gave me some data to work with for coming up with version 2. I have some ideas to spread the magnets out using a tripod arrangement on articulate arms. This is the time in my life where I can easily start trying to justify the purchase of a desktop 3D printer. Maybe you can take this idea and run with it. If you do, please send me some info. I like the idea of collaboration.

I have a bunch of pics and edits to make to my recent weekend ride report. That will be coming as I get back into the swing of things. Come back soon for that!

Blue