Want to save some money? A GoPro Homemade Mount Could Be The Answer

You’ve got a bag full of goodies…but for now all you can do is just stick them to all the obvious places. Side or top of your helmet, right… everyone goes for that! It’s a POV! Yep, you’re not wrong. But not everyone’s POV is the same, so get in the garage and knock yourself up the Daddy of all mounts!

And don’t forget, we can never cover all sports ourselves so if you have some good ideas from your discipline, send them in and maybe we’ll add it.

Homemade Chesty

In this case all you need is the box your GoPro arrived in…

The GoPro team may be looking to sell their own chesty, but I think it’s the sign of a quality product that they knowingly give you the basics of one in presentation box.

1. Tucked under its perspex case is the box-mount used to display your shiny new toy. If you’ve got a drill or a soldering iron and some old rucksack/school bag straps, then you have everything you need to knock yourself up a Chesty and use the extra cash to fund other things like SD cards.
2. Take a look at the real thing and you’ll see that you’ve got one strap around the core and one over each shoulder.
3. Finding a strap should be pretty easy. Most people have a 20-year-old rucksack that they kept ‘because you never know’. And if you’re too young for that then go in the cupboard and pull out the old school bag that saw all that abuse during college. If you’ve got a friend in marketing or congress, these people hand out the company info packs in cheap backpacks/bum bags/id neck leashes all the time…odds are you’ll get some straps at zero cost from somewhere…
4. Using either a drill or a soldering iron all you have to do is drill/melt four slots. One each side and two on the top.
5. The rest is down to the sewing. If you’re not the best seamstress in the world then phone a friend, neighbor…or just ask a complete stranger in the street; it’ll save you £$€40 on the real thing.

Homemade Bar Mount

Handle-bar, cross-bar, roll bar, draw bar…or just the golf club bar!
Get down the hardware store and grab yourself the things on this list. Have an idea of what you want to fix things to so that you have some sort of dimension in mind. Also remember that steel/aluminium sections are normally sold in 1 meter lengths, so this means that you’ll have enough for several applications (unless you have something unusual in your head).

Square section hollow tube:
Steel or aluminium depending on needs, 15 to 20 mm cross-section is good for most brackets. Don’t get anything that will bend.
Long bolts: Again, it’s down to your fixing point but if you buy long you can cut them down; buy short and you limit your choices.
Small counter-sunk screws: 3 mm works great.
Duct tape/rip repair tape/plumbers tape: Water-proof can be a safer option, depending on where you live/what you do.

You should be able to pick all that up for around £$€15. If you can’t, use a different hardware store…somewhere the owner doesn’t drive a Porsche.

If you didn’t already have a real design in your head then get some measurements down on paper. A drill, saw, and file should be enough to do the job.

The better you get the profile of the object that you’re fixing to the better the bracket will hold in place. This is the advantage over the actual GoPro roll-bar mount as you can gear it to object in question. A basic semi-circle or a V may do the job, so save yourself some work by using your head before your elbow grease.
Off to the shed.

• Measure and cut length.
• Cut profile.
• Drill holes.
• Fit GoPro base and secure with screw.
• Finish off with protective tape.

The example in the photo took around 45 minutes to make (not including shopping). Unless you have been particularly greedy with your bar you should get four or five different mounts out of it; money well spent!

Homemade Seat/Pole Mount

Facing forwards, facing backwards! Swing it like the real thing with a homemade convertible seat/pole mount
Every biker has a bag of broken parts…put them to good use!

Seat mount for bikes

If you didn’t already knock up a seat post mount for your bike with the bar that you bought then here’s another option. We love the film that comes from these because it really inspires the person chasing to get a close as possible; and as we all know, the harder we try the more interesting the footage becomes!

You’re a keen cyclist? Chances are you’ll have an old clip from either a lamp, a tool bag or an actual seat clamp that’s going spare. If you mountain bike chances are you’ll have so many of these broken items lying around in the hope that “next time I’ll break the other half of the clip and that will make me a pair again” that you be happy to finally do something with them.

It is always better to secure your mounts with something really solid, so if you have the option of a metal fitting that’s not too heavy then it’s the way to go. Some might say that there’s a risk to the GoPro housing as it’s more likely to break than the metal bracket, but if you want to look through hours of footage that was ruined by vibration that’s a choice you have to make.

So even if the body of the bracket is plastic, as the one seen in the photo, it can be stiffened up by using a metal clamping plate.

Pole mount using the bike seat clip

Once you take the under-seat mount off you can grab the quick-release from your seat.

Use it in place of one of the screws that secures the seat mount and you can now use it to clamp on to varying sizes of pole, be that a ski pole, a simple branch if you are out in the field, or on a pair of crutches if the last session didn’t quite go as planned.

Homemade Go Anywhere Bulldog Clip

Straight out of the office draw

This one is really a go-anywhere mount that you can clip to anything from your finger to your boots. Why spend money on a tripod when you can a household item and clip this to the back of a chair?

Hands up if you don’t have an IKEA store in your town. OK, you people can leave the room and go out into the back garden which is probably a desert, a mountain, or a river, as everywhere else has an IKEA. OK, we don’t know where you live, but the chances are that if you ever bought a modern day piece of flat-pack furniture you’ll always have some fixings left in the bag. Gone are the days of going back to the store to ask for missing parts; its cheaper to give you two of everything than pay the salary of an over-sized customer service department.

So here we go:

• Using only two left-over jointing plates from an IKEA curtain rail and the bulldog clip from your sons art portfolio (he may miss it, but chances are he’s fourteen and more concerned with his hair and his spots).
• Put one plate either side the clip, top or side mounting is up to you, but it’s easy enough to change around.
• Screw one end together using the grub-screws or bolts that should be holding you furniture together. No, it’s a joke, there should be spare ones of these as well.
• Using either the 3 mm counter-sunk screws that you bought earlier, or a 4 mm one that will screw directly into the IKEA plates, drill and secure the GoPro base. Obviously, the sizes depend on the furniture supplier, but we guess you get the idea.

We admit we got a little fancy with this by adding an old tripod head at a later stage, but once you start you just can’t help trying something else.

Now you can clip your GoPro to all sorts of things, from the fence to the back of your mate’s trousers.