Dumb and Dumber

Last week one of my son's and I rigged up a way of fixing my newly purchased GoPro camera to my red bike. Tomorrow, on the UK Mothers Day, I am taking part in a ride to honour British Soldiers and I want to take some video of the 10,000 motorbikes that have registered and are expected to attend.

My son and I created something that would work, but if I am honest, I didn’t entirely trust to be strong enough, so I decided to buy some RAM Mounts. Using some of bobscoots guidance, I contacted GPS City in Las Vegas and ordered some parts from there as I knew you couldn’t get RAM Mounts in the UK. I was hoping that these would arrive in time and sure enough, as I had paid $74 extra to get these shipped by priority air service, they arrived on Friday morning.

As usual, packages with gadgets in usually don’t take long to be opened in this household and just a few minutes later, I was looking at the four parts I had ordered.

I had selected two different sizes of U-Bolt fixing, so that these could be fixed to either the handlebars or the second were ordered specifically for my Road King, the crash bars. I have already fixed one of these to the red bike....






















I had also ordered a short RAM Arm in chrome.

And finally I had ordered a small Camera Mount Mini Plate that connects the camera to the RAM Arm.... WAIT A MINUTE, WHAT IS THIS????....






















How DUMB is that? This is not a Camera Mount Mini Plate – either I ordered the wrong thing, or GPS City sent the wrong part. I checked the delivery note. I had ordered the correct part, but they had sent something completely different. Argh!! This being Friday, there was no time left to get the correct part shipped from Vegas in time for the ride on Sunday.

My wife suggested I should look for something else in the UK, but I knew it was useless. These parts are not sold in the UK, but I decided to try anyway. Sitting down in front of my laptop I started to search and what did I find within about 30 seconds – a supplier of Ram Mounts just 10 miles away from where I live!!! I know I should have listened to my wife! If GPS City were dumb for sending the wrong part, I was even DUMBER for paying a small fortune to get something delivered all that way when I could get it just down the road.

I gave Buybits a call and they were terrific, helping me select a part that would work (they didn’t have the exact part that I wanted) and it arrived in the mail at 9am the next day - on Saturday morning. Here is the camera base that was delivered....






















Here is the completed set up ready for my ride tomorrow....

I hope it works tomorrow and in the next few days I will hopefully post some video of the event.

Even though the set-up is ready for tomorrow, I still feel dumber.