Stealthy accessories

Some items shouldn't be shown to the whole world, but it sure would be convenient to have them on your motorcycle all the time. Loading your jacket pockets with your cell phone, headphones, MP3 player, etc. etc. etc will almost always leave you with something your forgot. That's why I try to keep as much as possible on the bike at all times.

Possibly the thing that should be kept most secure is your garage door opener. You really don't want some low-life to write down your plate number and steal your opener. You might return from your afternoon ride to an empty house. After all, you just gave him the key if he can look up your plate on the internet!

Here's a secret. Thieves generally take only what's obvious and quick. The trick is to make your opener non-obvious. It's a pretty simple three step process.

Step one - buy the smallest garage door opener unit you can find. Genie makes a generic 'learning' opener that can be purchased at Lowes or Home Depot. It works nicely with every modern 'learning' garage door mechanism I've seen.

Step two - paint the little unit flat black (see "Always buy black" in a later blog entry). Simply take the single screw out of the back of the unit. Pop the tiny printed circuit board out, and paint the buttons and body lightly with my recommended paint. Heavy painting will make the buttons stick and that won't be cool.

Step three - use good quality black velcro to mount the garage door opener to the back side of your TechMount. You'll learn where to push the button, but the theives will never see it!

You'll get a couple of brownie points if you can find my garage door opener in the first pic below. It's there and it can be seen, but nobody is gonna guess it's the opener. Obviously I show it in complete detail in the second pic (shown from the bottom up).