Speedo's and Mountain Bike Computers

The speedo on my rangie is knackerd. It wanders all over the place. Probably needs new unit and cable.

My question is:

As I have a spare bike computer in the garage. As a short term thing, would it be possible to fit this to the rangie? I would need somewhere to fixed mount the sender unit and somewhere to put the magnet on the wheel.

Has anybody done this before? or is this another one of my 'stupid' ideas.........

Mark.,

In article , Andy Carpenter writes

My thought is to use the front end of the rear prop shaft instead - closer and easier, and probably wouldn't imbalance it noticeably (the magnets are tiny).

The subject was discussed last week and might still be on your news server, otherwise try Google groups.

Regards,

Simonm.

Problem with doing it that way is calibrating the bike speedo, i tried this on my last van.. when i was going abroad, the kph markings on the speedo were tiny, and the needle wobbled enough to make it hard to read the kph markings,

So i got a cheap bike speedo.. 5 quid from halfrauds, extended the wired.. the wires have string in them to stop them snapping so easy.. but makes them a pain to solder.. i used crimp connectors for the extension,

First i tried the magnet on the prop shaft, but there was no way i could enter a low enough number to calibrate it.. it wants a bike tyre rim size.. not many bikes have 4 inch diamiter wheels.. so the magnet on the prop is spinning far too fast,

I ended up glueing the magnet to the inside of the drivers front wheel rim, bit of areldite did the job, just leave it long enough to set before you drive off.. get the wheel balanced afterwards too if you want.. just remember to tell the tyre fitters the magnet should be there.. or they'll try to remove it with the other weights when balancing,

I then made up a bracket off the caliper mounting bolt to hold the sensor near the rim, measured the tyre diamiter, and entered that number into the calibration screen on the bike speedo,

Worked fine from then on, just switched it to kph when i was abroad, and looked at that to see my speed.. it also gave me a couple of extra mile counters too which was handy.. and it was nice to see i was burning a couple of million calories a day just driving the van about too :))

I've used a bike computer on a motorcycle before and it worked OK. I'm not sure they're designed to go above 50 or 60 mph, but that was a while back and I don't remember so well!

My suggestion -- get a cheap GPS receiver. It makes a great speedomoeter (used one for years in my rustbucket Ford Escort), and you can use the GPS for lots of other things when not in the vehicle.