!!!MANIC Salamander - the Gadget Shelf

Gadget Shelf

One day, I was hanging out at Betty's Bikes & Buns and I met this fellow who had invented a neat new gadget for himself.

His R1100RT BMW had a Big Mak tankbag setup on it. Very clever - to fill up, just fold it up over the gauges and windscreen, and the filler cap is right there. One problem: A tankbag takes up a lot of prime real estate where you might otherwise want to put a gadget to use while riding. Like a GPS or radar detector. What's more, many riders are discovering how cool it is to concentrate all their gadgets in or on the tankbag, so the whole bag can plug into a single outlet on the bike, and all the expensive gadgets can be removed and kept safe when you get off the bike.

So the need was clearly there, to mount some gadgets on top of the tankbag. He came up with a very simple piece of sheetmetal that stuck into the same pocket as the tongue of the tankbag mount, so it would come on and off, and lock in place, with the tankbag. It bent up around the front of the bag, and held his Garmin right front and center. Perfect.

A load of people in his BMW user group wanted him to make some for them. But his heart was not in production or metalwork per se. So he offered to let me copy and improve on his work, so these devices would be available to the public. I took him up on it.

We spent a few hours brainstorming on all the ways the original needed improvement. I finished the prototype, tried it on his machine, and made just a few more improvements.

The result is depicted here. Nice, thick, solid lasercut Aluminum, Black Anodized. Tough, trouble-free, useful. I left the lip blank, because if I tried to drill the holes for every GPS mount on the market, it would look like it was supposed to be generic, which is a bad look. If you must use screws, the metal is pretty easy to drill. In fact, some customers drill holes in it so they can get rid of the original platen that came with their tank bag and use the Gadget Shelf instead.