i’ll start by saying that I’m no mechanical genius and there is no rocket-science here. Once you have all the bits in your hand it’s quite obvious but I thought this little article might be instructive for anyone wondering about using a quadlock on an ST1300.
For Christmas I received a quadlock case for my iPhone. It’s a good case, solid but minimalist, with the quadlock mount built into the back of it.
First additional purchase was the car mount for the Falcon, all works well. Click-on, click-off.
The obvious next project was to mount it to the steed. Quadlock does make motorcycle mounts but they are designed to attach to either a tubular handlebar or a mirror stalk. Of course real touring bikes don’t have either of these, and I figured that a RAM mount attached to the clutch reservoir was what I wanted to use. And so began a little project to convert the bar-mount quadlock to RAM mount.
Here is the original product prior to the warranty being voided:
Rip off the rubber coating to reveal the innards. It’s held together with an M5 bolt and nut.
First, cut off the tubular part of the mount using a hacksaw, chainsaw, bread knife or your preferred weapon of mass destruction:
RAM makes a ball with an attached M6 thread so I grabbed some M6 x 30mm from Bunnings, drilled out the quadlock slightly to take the M6 bolt and re-assembled as shown:
On goes the RAM ball with an extra M6 nut and a good dose of Locktite.
I initially put some Araldite resin around the nut to hold it in place, but I found later that because the quadlock is a twist action the bolt wanted to unscrew from the nut so I ended up filling the inside with Araldite covering the nut and part of the bolt. So much for dismantling it later - that’s not gonna happen! In hindsight a better solution would have been to epoxy the nut in place and just use locktite on the bolt thread to stop it unwinding.
I wanted to mount it from the reservoir so the phone was up high enough to sit easily in my peripheral vision. The RAM plate comes with 20mm, 30mm and 35mm bolts so of course I needed 25mm :-). Side cutters to the rescue. Man those bolts are tough.
Finally, all done. Here is the end result:
