Hunter usually does the navigating for us. I don’t tax my little brain over it. We’ve ridden motorcycles thousands of miles on unmarked dirt roads never failing to arrive at the correct spot in the end. Every now and then I’ll ask hunter where the hell we are and he’ll point to his GPS screen and say, “Right there, on the trail.” I didn’t want to appear damaged, it gets rough on the trail once they know you’re compromised so I’d nod my head and mumble something about waypoints, acting like I saw something on Hunter’s GPS other than a featureless grey screen. Thing is, you can’t always have Hunter with you all the time or even most times.
I’ve bought several GPS navigators over the years and all of them suffer from the same deficiencies: they are too small and the monochromatic, grey-on-grey screens are too difficult for my terrible eyes to see. This Christmas CT bought me a Garmin Zumo
The XT has a ton of features. It will Bluetooth to your phone and give you traffic and road conditions. I guess you can get spoken directions over your intercom thingy. None of that is important to me or is the main thing the XT does best. This Zumo
The Garmin Zumo
Once I had the bracket mounted on the right side I decided I didn’t like the GPS sticking out in the breeze waiting for a hole to be busted in the housing by one of the many loose rocks Hunter kicks up into my shins, headlight, face shield and fingers. I would pass him if I knew where I was going.
I moved the Zumo
I was snugging the U-bolt down a little each side-to-side when the bracket broke in two. Rats. With the bracket now useless I had to dig deep into my long history of crappy motorcycle repair. I ended up sawing off the rest of the busted bracket leaving only the ball joint and a chunk of pot metal to serve as a base. Then I through-drilled the ball joint remnant with a ¼-inch drill bit. Once I had the thing weakened beyond all hope I through-bolted the ball Joint to an existing angle aluminum piece. The squared off base contacts the top handlebar clamp, I’m hoping this stops the whole GPS from rotating on the ¼-inch bolt.
It seems to be fairly secure but I’m going to add a small cable with a quick release clip to help keep the Garmin Zumo
The wiring is easy on the Garmin Zumo
It all made for fairly clean installation and I can’t wait to try out that super bright screen on the trail. I’ll do a follow up story on actually using the Garmin Zumo
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