Thursday, June 6, 2013

OTF bike gps mount

Avoid cockpit instrument clutter... 

Gone were the days of the "quarter turn" bike mount for GPS devices.
The rave now - is the "out the front" mount for cyclo computers and bicycling GPS.
And these things don't come cheap...

My cockpit set-up on the Dahon Jetstream EX
The name of the game: getting ripped-off...

Believe it or not, some GPS retailer wanted RM220 for a pack of quarter turn mount. Its just a piece of plastic held together with two pieces of rubberbands and a rubber foot.
Similarly, some years back, I paid a bomb for a piece of handlebar mount for my Garmin Oregon 300.

The original Garmin mount
Choices, choices, choices....

There aren't many choices in the market for OTF mounts.
Garmin has one the goes at RM180 a piece.
The other alternative was the Bar-Fly GPS mount at RM85, sold by Quicksports, a staunch supporter of the Malaysian Foldies Forums.
The owner, Mr Yong, is a very nice guy!
Another alternative is the SRAM "quickview" computer mounth.
This retails for 20Euros excluding freight charges.

Paying more than we should.. 

At a retail price of RM180, the trader gets at least RM50 profit.
But, I think its a 150% profit margin for a piece of plastic molded in Taiwan.
The price to beat for the Garmin OTF mount, is RM127.00 which is practically, the MSRP on Garmin's website.
SRAM's quickview mount
But, if you really couldn't give a shit about brands and stuff, you might get a mount for RM50 or less from China-made copies of the OTF mount.

These are the items you can hunt on trading sites such as Lelong.com, Mudah.com, Alibaba.com and so on.

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