Delvcam Motorycle Gooseneck Mount Review

[YoshiHNS]

I saw this mount and thought that it would be pretty cool to get some odd and interesting angles while riding with the added bonus of essentially having a tripod when you're not riding. So I bought it and finally got the bike out of the garage. Should apologize that I don't have pics of the camera on the mount. Only have 1 camera at the moment.

B&H Store Product Link

Open the box and here are the contents.

You get the mount, a foot of cork with one side sticky, and two extra screws.

This is the breakdown of the mount. Everything is metallic. There is not one bit of plastic that I have found, aside from the wrapping on the neck. Feels like it weights 1-2 lbs. Definitely well built. The whole design is very simple. The base are two steel blocks with a V cut into them that screw together. The gooseneck actually screws into the top base mount. This connection feels fairly solid. The top ball simply screws apart into the pieces shown. If you don't like the mount they give, you should be able to put any ball-mount in there, such as a mount with a quick-release plate instead of a screw. Again, everything feels very solid.

The neck itself is about a foot long, which is a little shorter than what the advertisement picture showed, but still long enough. It is very stiff. You will have to overbend and allow it to relax to get it to the right position, but that should be expected. The whole neck is covered in the wrap, so no contaminants should get in there.

Now for putting it on the bike. The first thing that I discovered was that the VFR has absolutely no place to mount this camera. There were only two viable places on my 4th gen: The passenger peg, and the grab bars. And here is where the faults begin to pile up. The mount was meant for round tubes, something rare on the VFR. Finding a way to mount it on the pegs was a bit of a task. Took me about 5 minutes just to get the base in a decent position to be tightened down. Use of the cork is absolutely necessary. It really helps it hold its place with oblong shapes.

Tightening it down was another issue. You have to tighten it from both ends. The nuts are not nylon nuts, and the washers are useless. I had to hold the nut with my finger and use a screwdriver to get it on tight. I worked my way around once to get everything semi-tight, then another time to get it tight. This made it fairly solid, and I had difficulty budging it with my hands. To correct this shortfall, I would either machine a small pocket for the nut so I can just turn the screw to tighten it, or get a screw with a square underneath the head and just have to turn the nut. And replace the stupid washer they provide with a normal split washer.

However, since the gooseneck simply connects to the mount by screwing into it, you could simply make your own mounts or have someone make them for you. The hardest part would be drilling and tapping the whole for the gooseneck, and there isn't a lot of material involved, so it would be cheap. I'll probably make my own mounts down the road, but they would bolt to some part of the frame rather than connect to appendages.

And now for the test ride. I used the mount on the grab bars for the first test run, first pass with the mount tilted out horizontally, and second time with the mount near vertical. Should be mentioned that I did have to tighten the mount again when I moved the gooseneck to the vertical position. This could have been from either vibrations or the poor choice of screw/nut/washer. I would like to believe its from the latter. The camera I used was an HF10. For a comparison on how bad the vibrations are, I've included two short bits of video shot with the camera mounted to my tank mount (remember, the tank is not solidly mounted at all).

Disclaimer: Most mounting points on my 4th gen are not very solid. The gas tank is not solidly mounted, nor are my grab bars. The grab bars have a good bit of wiggle to them due to the screws holding them not able to tighten down properly. Also keep in mind that I am using a HD camcorder that uses a CMOS sensor. CMOS sensors are super sensitive to vibrations. For on bike, this is a pretty bad setup. Only thing that would make it worse would be using dvd or hdd as a recording media. And I apologize for the first pass being zoomed in and aimed too far down. I'll get better video up later.

VIDEO TEST 1

In my opinion, the mount actually works very well, as long as everything is tightened down well. The vibrations were nowhere near as bad with my tank mount, and I can only expect better results with either a SD or CCD sensor camcorder. There aren't many places that you can attach the included mount to on the VFR, but this mount can get angles that no other mount can. One mount I would like to make would be one that mounted underneath the grab bars for the 5th and 6th gen. This would probably be the best place to use this camera mount.

Pros:

Can get some really cool angles

Tripod-on-a-bike

All metal construction

Stiff neck doesn't flex around while riding

Ability to make custom mounts

Ball head allows any angle

Can ideally use different heads

Cons:

Included mount only good for round tube

Difficult to tighten

Nuts can still back out

If anyone out there wants to give this a better test run with a normal camcorder, let me know and we'll work something out.

[YoshiHNS]

If you are seriously interested in testing this thing out an potentially buying it, let me know. Could do something where you pay for the shipping to try, and the rest when you commit or something.

Also, if there is enough interest, i'll consider a production run of custom mounts.

[alwaysaware]

It looks like your going to have really interesting camera angles. Its gonna be a scarry shot if your splitting lanes with it mounted on the side. :biggrin: