I think I've got a fair bit of Yankee ingenuity. Actually, it's son of Irish immigrant ingenuity, but you get the idea. Here's an example. I bought a GPS unit a while ago, a hand held unit. Being frugal, I figured we could use it for all purposes: biking, hiking, car. Hiking was out since I was too cheap to spend an extra $100 for the map unit that actually had trails. It was pretty useless in the car since you really couldn't see it if you were driving, so the only way it could be used is if I were riding shotgun and calling out directions. Susan subsequently got fed up and bought herself a real one for the car, so that pretty much left the bike. It didn't occur to me that my all purpose unit might need a holder for use on the bike. Seemed a waste of money, besides I had heard rumblings that the bike holders really weren't very well designed and there had been reports of GPS units housed in these holders becoming projectiles.
I tried for a while carrying the thing in a belt pack, but that didn't work out too well. I either had to stop everywhere I thought there might be a turn, or try to fish the thing out of the belt pack with one hand while holding the handlebars with the other, and try to figure out where I was. This seemed like a recipe for FDGB*.
Then I got the bright idea of fashioning my own home grown holder. It seemed to me like the unit would fit nicely between the arms of my aero bars, all I needed was somehow to hold it in place. So I wrapped some old inner tubes around the bars to serve as a cushion, plopped the unit in place, and lashed it all together with, you guessed it, more inner tubes.
This worked, and I could make it arbitrarily tight just by stretching out the inner tubes more, or wrapping them around again. Unfortunately, they were a bit wide, so they obscured a large part of the screen real estate. Then there was a ride where the screen seemed to be marching away for no apparent reason until I figured out that the inner tube was right on top of the little knob that does scrolling. Back to the drawing board.
I then tried slicing the inner tubes into narrow strips, more or less like making pasta, but it was hard to get them to a uniform thickness, and they were still a bit wide. Then I began to think outside the box, or in this case the tube, and decided to use regular rubber bands. The ones they use to wrap broccoli seemed just right, so I encouraged Susan to begin a broccoli diet. I amassed a stash of broccoli bands, and set out to outfit all three of my weekend bikes (I figured I didn't need a GPS unit on my commuting bike, though my critics will say that I have been known to overshoot my house). The broccoli bands were a bit wide and not quite long enough, so I ended up with regular rubber bands (or elastics as you New Englanders say). The problem here is that you couldn't really get them tight enough, so I would use two or three. A few test rides proved successful, and I really thought this was the solution. Then on one ride with some "hors catégorie" potholes, the unit broke loose. Fortunately, I was able to catch it before it went sailing off into the sunset. On another ride I was not so lucky, and the unit had a painful FDGB. Like the famous watch, it took a licking but kept on ticking, but I knew I had to find a better solution.
Then I noticed the D-ring on the back that is used to open the unit to change batteries, and figured that if I threaded some string through there, and tied that to the aero bars, it would at least stay in place when subjected to the several G's of force you get going through the local potholes.
Early results are encouraging, though I haven't yet subjected it to the likes of Dudley Road.
* FDGB = Fall down, go boom
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