Pepper spray mounting bracket for bikes

Compared to the other places I've lived and biked extensively (Utah, Colorado, Missouri and Illinois), living in west Texas has had one unfortunate feature that the others mostly did not: unfenced dogs. I recognize that this occurs everywhere, but never with the frequency that I've experienced here. I have witnessed one situation where a dog ran into the road and took out a cyclist's front wheel, causing the rider to crash. I have witnessed multiple situations where a curious dog has run into the road because of a cyclist (usually me) and nearly into the path of a car. This has made it clear to me that the carelessness of these dog owners is posing a danger both to cyclists and also to the dogs themselves. I was initially reluctant to use pepper spray on dogs, but I've now concluded that this is the best solution for everyone. It's also clear to me that dogs learn quickly, as there is one particular dog that I see regularly and have sprayed once, who now stays put when I ride by.

With that introduction, I'm writing here to describe my new preferred solution for carrying pepper spray on rides: a mounting bracket that mounts underneath a water bottle cage, similar to many tire pump mounts. In fact, one of my bikes has the tire pump mount on one side of the water bottle and the pepper spray mount on the other side. This solution makes the pepper spray much more accessible when needed on short notice than a jersey pocket, for example.

I have bought multiple different brand pepper sprays, and they all have approximately the same dimensions. This bracket should work for any standard pepper spray, such as the one pictured below, which has a diameter of about 21 mm or 13/16 of an inch.

Like some of my other 3D printed projects, this bracket was designed using OpenSCAD. It works well for this type of design, though it's not necessarily suited to more complex designs. I got a prototype printed by Shapeways, and the first version looks like this:

Similar to many tire pump mounts, this mounting bracket has mounting holes that offer a certain amount of lateral adjustment in the placement, which allows the outer mount to be placed a range of distances from the down tube or seat tube of the bike. This is important because so many modern bikes, particularly those with carbon frames, have bigger diameter tubes in the down tube of the frame than in the past.

This picture shows the mounted bracket with a water bottle in the bottle cage.

Here is the bracket with pepper spray attached.

With the pepper spray in this position, it should be easily and quickly reachable by any rider accustomed to reaching down for a water bottle while riding. It has now been used for some off-road riding and has held the pepper spray securely so far. A bracket like this can be purchased from Shapeways via the product page I created.

3D-printed stem mount for Garmin

Last year I acquired a Garmin Edge 25. Garmin devices like it come with a handlebar mount, but they are less than ideal. The rubber O-rings that it uses to attach tend to break over time, and the mount tends to flex when buttons on the computer are pushed compared to the other available aftermarket mounts. I recently came up with my own design, which I had 3D printed in aluminum by Shapeways. This design is meant to attach to the top two stem bolts, and places the computer directly over the junction of the stem and handlebars. The bracket looks like this:

The bracket uses the Garmin mount inserts made by K-Edge (left), which can be purchased from their site for $5. The K-Edge insert comes with two M3 screws. The K-Edge mounts are threaded, but mine is not, so installation requires two M3 nuts (right) to be bought separately. These can generally be found at any hardware store.

 

The K-Edge insert attached to the stem mount looks like this.

 

Attaching the completed mount to the bike requires replacing the original stem bolts with longer ones.

This is the installed mount with a Garmin Edge 25 attached.

This version of the bracket is designed for a stem with bolts separated by 20 mm. I have created a product page on Shapeways for it. The design is easy to modify to accommodate other bolt spacings, and I hope to add other spacing options to the product page soon.