Tag: Gadgets

Last year I reviewed the Shapeheart mobile phone case for motorcycles, it was a good budget offering but had a few niggles I was less fond of. This year the good chaps at Shapeheart took heed of this critique and have released a new and improved version for 2022, which they were kind enough to send in for me to review. Let’s take a closer look at this new model and see how it compares.

Shapeheart is a small firm from France, kicked off by two clever entrepreneurs who started out making arm mounts for runners and then later branched out into solutions for cyclists, scooters and motorcycles.

There’s nothing quite like getting lost on a motorbike to clear your mind and find yourself. But other days you really just need to get from A to B without hassle or stress. Maybe you need to be somewhere for work, maybe you’re off to a social rendezvous or maybe you’re leading your crew on a ride. For this, you really need a satnav, but motorcycle satnav’s aren’t cheap. However, you’ve got a decent phone in your pocket with loads of GPS apps on hand, so why not use that? For this, you’ll need something like this Shapeheart phone mount for motorbike.

The folks behind the Shapeheart asked me to review their new motorcycle phone mount, which promises to be a good budget contender, but is it the best motorcycle phone mount for the money? Read on to find out more.

On my old Fazer, I had installed a Stebel Nautilus air horn, a super loud horn that saved my bacon on a number of occasions on my daily commute into London. As such, I was keen to install similar on my new FZ6, but with the Stebel horns less readily available in the UK I came across the Denali SoundBomb. On first glance, it appears to be a spitting image of the Stebel horn and is priced similarly at £40.

With the horn being such a large lump, mounting needed some thought as the FZ6 stock horn is mounted between the forks and there are no handy mounting points on the sides under the fairing. Denali sells a number of specific bike and generic crash bar mounting brackets, but unfortunately nowt suitable for the FZ6. That’s when I found the Denali SoundBomb Split version which separates the two halves of the air horn, thus allowing the compressor and horn elements to be mounted individually. A supplied thick heat-resistant hose then connects the two halves. As with other large horns, the compressor should be wired to the stock horn via a relay due to its 20A power draw. i.e. the stock horn wire triggers the compressor via a relay, to power it directly from the battery on its own fused line.

Keeping your motorcycle tyre pressures correct is crucial to keeping your bike handling well. When down on pressure and you can really notice the handling go down hill, with cornering suddenly feeling unnatural and tyres squaring off faster. As such every biker needs a good pump they can rely on to keep tyre pressures on spec at all times. About a year ago I picked up this Ring analogue air pump from Screwfix for just under £20 quid and has since been put to good use in that time. Read more to find out my final verdict after a year of use.

I tend to have a love-hate relationship with bus lanes; when you can use them they’re great for filtering past long queues of traffic, but with so many not open to bikes or only active at random times it can be a pain to work out when you can take advantage of them. Especially so when you’re riding an older bike with no clock! This is exactly the problem with my wife’s Honda CBF500. Not wanting to get caught out with a bus lane fine, we bought this Oxford analog clock.