So I ride my bike to and from work almost every day and given NHV's slow but methodical march towards normalization of bicycles on roadways, I decided it would be safe and proper to get a bike light. The bicycle accessory industry has a dazzling array of options with equally dazzling expense. Because my priorities are focused less upon lighting the roadway and more upon making my presence evident to motorists, I opted out of spending hundreds of dollars on a high tech “bike light”. My solution is a pretty high lumen, decent quality LED flashlight from Home Depot ($30-$40) and two pipe clamps ($0.25 apiece).
I also wanted to mount my smartphone on my handlebars for things like MapMyRide or painfully obsessive accumulation of PokemonGO mileage. I bought a cheap ($20) plastic handlebar mount. It’s an articulated tray that you snap your phone into. That worked well for about a year or so, but because cold weather increases the brittleness of otherwise flexible plastic, eventually, the flexible plastic clips that hold the phone in place broke off. Rather than make the same mistake over and over again by buying another (the definition of insanity) I decided to try a product improvement. I filed off the remains of the broken tabs leaving me with essentially a flat platform. Then I bought a silicone wetsuit ($15) and CY glued it to the platform, hanging enough of it off side so I could flex my phone in and out of it. Voila…fixed!
