Homemade IKEA Roadbook Holder

There is an updated version of this Roadbook Holder that doesn't require any special tools here -

https://www.mercenary.ie/2024/02/homemade-ikea-roadbook-holder-ii.html

Acerbis used to make a cheap enduro Roadbook Holder that retailed around 20 euro/pounds/dollars or whatever. But they don't anymore, and Roadbook Holders seem to start at over 100 euro. These Roadbook Holders are more expensive 'cos they have additional features and better build quality than those old Acerbis ones, but the Acerbis ones were perfectly functional. It seems to me there is still a need for a simple, cheap, hand-operated Roadbook Holder.

So here's my attempt, which began like so many things do, in IKEA...

So after rooting around looking at old lunchboxes and finding nothing suitable, I went to IKEA and found this. It's almost perfectly sized. It will comfortable hold a roll of paper 150 mm wide and offers a display height of 100 mm. The only way this box could be  more perfect would be if it was about 10 mm deeper to allow it to hold a slightly larger roll. It remains to be seen exactly how much paper it will hold, so maybe it will work out okay.

I think it cost about 4 euro. This box is also available with a range of other products inside but I chose this cos it's stuff I might actually use in the workshop...

...and I was pleasantly surprised to find a bunch of these things in the box. They looked perfectly designed for fixing things to the cross-brace commonly found on dirt-bike handlebars. One side is adhesive, the other is designed to attach to a round cable with a cable-tie. I'm pretty sure you could use them to cable-tie this actual box to the bars, maybe using a bit of sliced rubber fuel line to provide some grip. I'm not going to mount the box this way, but it could be done.

When you get into it, the box isn't as straight and square as you might expect and there's no well-defined edge anywhere to use as a datum. It's important that the Rollers and Scrolls are parallel to one another but it doesn't much matter where exactly they go. If I was making more than one unit, I'd make a jig to align the holes but because I'm just making one, using a Surface Gauge allowed me to sort of wing it. I don't know or care precisely where the holes are, but using the surface gauge to mark out the holes ensures that the are all in precisely the same place on each side.

The rest of the ingredients I already had in stock in the workshop. They are, two knobs threaded M6, one smaller than the other. Two grommets ID 6mm, OD 10mm. And four lengths of 10 mm aluminium bar. Had I different ingredients in stock, I would have built the thing differently but it seems to have worked out just fine.

After marking out where the holes go, I started them by pushing a scribe right through the surface and finished them with a hand drill (nothing on the box is square so drilling them on the pillar drill was more trouble than it was worth). The big holes are 10 mm, the smaller ones are 5 mm and the arrangement is identical on both sides.

These are the rollers. I turned shoulders onto two of the aluminium bars. The shoulders have a slight taper to allow clearance in the rounded corners of the box. I used a deburring tool to finesse the holes until the rollers were free to spin. The tapered shoulders locate the rollers laterally and prevent them from dropping out.

These are the scrolls. One end was tapped M6 to accommodate the two knobs. The other had a boss turned diameter 6 mm, length 5 mm and then tapped M4. The bosses are a snug fit in the grommets preventing lateral movement and providing a small amount of friction to prevent the scrolls from freewheeling.

M4 bolts and washers hold the scrolls in place. The rollers simply hold themselves into the corners while remaining free to spin.

The finished item ready for mounting on the bike. Most Roadbook Holders have two equal sized knobs. I chose to use a smaller knob on the bottom scroll to make it less likely to be accidentally used while riding the bike and looking where I'm going rather than paying attention to what my hand is doing. If I need to reverse the bottom scroll it's cos I'm lost so I'll most likely be stationary, scratching my head with my throttle hand.

Another nice little feature of the IKEA Fixa box is that the lid is hinged. It's really simple to open and close and there's no danger of losing the lid while you're loading the roadbook.

I chose to mount the Roadbook Holder above my GPS (note the adjustable odometer just behind and to the left of the GPS). Mounting it here looks a bit ungainly but I can see it, and operate it from either a sitting position or standing on the footpegs.

I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect the bike will no longer fit in the van. Arse!


EDIT - About a week later...

So I used the Roadbook Holder and it worked pretty well. I still don't know how long a roll it will hold but it held enough for a 100 km trip. I think it could definitely go with being deeper but the height and width were perfect. The rolls tended to unfurl a little (proper Roadbook Holders seem to suffer from this too) so a way to keep tension on the scrolls would make it easier to use. I'm going to try running an O-ring across the two scrolls like a caterpillar-track to see if this makes a difference.

 

#IKEA #Fixa #OneDayBuild #RoadbookHolder #EnduroRoadbook #KLR250 #StealthKLR #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage