The folks over at Montague folding bikes came up with a Go Pro camera mount hack and sent along the following guest post. Enjoy a sweet hack and an option for a folder.
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I'm sure you've all seen the portable Go Pro cameras on the market. They're easy to mount on a helmet or handlebars for riding footage, but we wanted a perspective that would show you the bike as well. For this we put together a homemade bracket to mount our Go Pro on the rear axle. The camera comes with a clip that attaches to a few different bases, one for helmets, one for handlebars, and there's one that's simply flat on the bottom with a sticky adhesive. For our custom bracket, we took a piece of steel about 11 inches long (you could use aluminum for a lighter weight option), drilled a hole on one end for the axle to pass through, and screwed the flat base to the other.
The Go Pro clip slides into one side of the base, so we kept the screw off to the other side, out of the way. The adhesive on the base also helped hold it in place.
Then we just clipped the camera into its bracket:
To mount it on the bike, we used an extra long quick release skewer. We drilled the whole large enough that it also works with a bolt on axle.
We had it angled back to get as much of the bike in the shot as possible:
The resulting video footage is just what we wanted. A unique perspective of your ride that shows the surrounding landscape, and the bike you're on. Check out the video to see (About halfway through is where the Go Pro footage starts).
The bikes being ridden in this video are Montague folding bikes. Their design is a bit of a bike hack in itself. No doubt you're familiar with other folding bikes, but the majority of them have tiny wheels, and lots of proprietary parts. Everyone wants the performance and ride quality of a full size bike, but transporting and storing them can be a hassle. That's where Montague comes in. With 10 different models ranging from 700c road bikes, to single speeds, and 26" mountain bikes, they all fold easily for the car trunk, train, or closet, and deliver the same performance as comparable non-folders.
Montague's folding design is unique in that it does not break the frame's tubing. Both halves rotate around the seat tube, leaving the front and rear intact. They overlap when unfolded, and give you an extremely strong frame. The design combined with full size wheels, and all industry standard components (you can customize your bike all you want!), means you won't even know you're in the saddle of a folding bike. Check out the entire line of Montague folding bikes at http://www.montaguebikes.com/.
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