Helmet Mounted Mirror

My latest version of the Chuck Harris mirror mount

I bought a Chuck Harris helmet mounted mirror from Rivendell about ten years ago. After a couple of years, the mirror was no longer usable because of corrosion of the reflecting surface, so I bought a Third Eye eyeglass mounting mirror and used the mirror, and a spoke nipple, to replace the original mirror. The new mirror isn't as pretty as Chuck's, but has lasted a lot longer.

When I changed helmets, I did my own spoke mount, using Goop rather than using Chucks spoke mount. I've gone through three helmets since then and, on the one I just got, I decided to redesign the mount. There were two reasons for the redesign: Desire to be able to use the mirror without a helmet and fear that airport inspectors were going to get me for carry that dangerous spoke onboard an airplane. The old mount used a entire spoke, bent at one end and Gooped to the helmet in two places.

When I toured in southern France during the 2003 heat wave, I 'learned' that it was much more comfortable to do long steep climbs in hot weather without my helmet. The problem, other than possible saftey issues, is that also meant without my helmet mirror, and I really don't like riding without that mirror. I alway wear my hat while touring, with or without my helmet, so the logical thing to do was to figure out how to mount my mirror to the bill of my hat.

After going through three security checks at the Frankfurt airport in 2003, I realized that the spoke I used to mount my mirror on my helmet was a more dangerous 'weapon' than some of things that were being confiscated from my fellow passengers, This year, flying out of Paris, I watched while an inspector looked at my helmet for more than a minute before passsing it to me. That convincd me I better come up with a better way of mounting my mirror.

Here you can see how the spoke nipple is glued to the mirror. That is old Goop that has seen a lot of years of UV exposure!
you can also see how the end of a spoke is bent and Gooped to the clip that originally was used for some kind of ID badge

I found the clip and figured out how to mount the spoke so that the mirror would work on the bill of my hat. I cut and bent the spoke, drilled out the rivet that was in the hole on the clip, and Gooped those two parts together. Then I screwed the mirror onto the spoke threads and I had a good, hat bill mounted, mirror.

I just bought a new Giro E2 helmet (actually NOS - it was made in 2001!) from Pricepoint and it has a built in visor. The mount, which worked fine on my hat bill, did not work on that visor. This doesn't matter for touring - I'll be wearing my hat - but it would be nice to be able to use the mirror without a hat on that helmet. I looked around my, very messy, garage for inspiration, and found a perfect piece of plastic to adapt the mirror mount to the new helmet's visor. I think it was a display hook for the packaging of some bicycle related thing. Whatever it was, it now is my visor mirror adapter! If I hadn't found this thing, I was going to glue - Goop of course - a tab of some semi-rigid material to the visor and mount the mirror to the part that stuck out in front of the visor.

Here is a top view showing how the 'visor mirror adapter' clips to the visor