Magicshine Helmet Mount 2021

The Magicshine Helmet Mount is angle-adjustable and gets the job done, but how successfully it manages it – and with what level of faff – depends a fair bit on your helmet. The strap design needs a rethink, too.

For this to work, you need either a helmet with a vent along its centre line (so you can strap this centrally across two bars), or a single wide but flat-topped central bar. On helmets with one narrow or domed central bar, the mount is pretty unstable.

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The webbing strap is tough, but it's a faff to tighten for two reasons. One is the way it doubles back on itself to reach the clamp – pulling the loose end traps the first half of the loop against the helmet, so it can't slide to take out the slack.

Secondly, the plastic clamp just doesn't want to sit close to the mount, where it needs to be to a) not stick into your head and b) be reachable with your fingers so you can clip it shut. It's one of those jobs where you wish you had about nine hands, and to top it off, the clamp takes some force to shut, too. It's no fun with cold fingers.

As with any strap-secured mount, it's probably not a good idea to fit this on a MIPS helmet, as even if you thread it between the helmet and the MIPS layer it could add friction and stop the liner doing its job.

Get it something like tight on a suitable helmet and it's actually fairly good. The top section adjusts through 60 degrees to allow for the angle of your head, and clamps securely with a GoPro-style thumbwheel/screw.

Unfortunately this isn't the rugged 'engineering grade' plastic you increasingly find in bike parts, and while it's certainly strong enough in normal use, it looks and feels like it could be brittle in a crash, especially around its tiny hinge pin. Then again, it is £8.99.

Despite the foam padding on the mount's base being thin and not very grippy, and the whole thing potentially sliding fore and aft as a result, the mount generally works okay for normal use (even with a fairly heavy light) because you naturally stabilise your head.

If the pad under the base was silicone it wouldn't move at all, while making the existing foam thicker would let it conform better and improve stability.

And while I'm on the 'ifs', if the clamp was integrated with the mount instead of the strap, or even if the strap was Velcro and attached on one side, tightening and securing this would be far, far easier.

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The price seems fair. We haven't reviewed any helmet mounts on their own, to compare, but at £8.99 it's on a par with Lezyne's, though obviously those are for Lezyne fittings rather than Magicshine.

If you have a suitably shaped lid and a Magicshine light you want to attach to it, the Magicshine Helmet Mount will work reasonably well, though it's neither very versatile nor particularly pleasing to use.

Verdict

Works reasonably well with suitably shaped helmets, though fiddly and hard to stabilise completely