When taking Ella to the dog park the other day, Jodie and I had a slight dilemma: what to do with our helmets?

Naturally, we didn’t want to carry them around the dog park with us. The helmets would both fit in the trunk, but they wouldn’t be secure (my trunk lock will get installed when I take the rig up to Raceway Services for its 500km first service). Besides, there will be plenty of trips we take where the trunk is full of other stuff, so we still need a way to securely stash the helmets elsewhere on the motorcycle.

A quick look around the garage, and our bicycles provided the answer. We’d make our own helmet lock instead.

WWID — What Would Ivan Do?

The elements of our DIY helmet lock are available at any bicycle shop, and are standard for any bicycle lock. Prices will vary by shop and brand.

• Braided steel cable (plastic-coated and with a loop on each end)
• U-lock

I opened the visors on each helmet and laid the helmets in the sidecar seat so the head openings were up against each other. I looped the cable through both openings a few times, tying in the helmets through the chin bars.

After unlocking the U-lock and running the “U” bar through the cable loops, I hung the helmets and bar on the sidecar windshield grab bar, and locked up the whole assembly. The result? Two secure helmets, safely locked up on the bike:

Now, this is not a perfect system. No security system ever is or will be. The main improvement we could make would be getting a longer U-lock just for the motorcycle. My current U-lock is too short to fit through both helmets. A longer U-bar would do the job of the steel cable, and would be much harder to break through.

In the future we’ll most likely be getting some proper helmet locks, but this is working fine for us so far. We were able to use and re-purpose equipment we already had and, above all, could lock up our helmets and feel confident they’d be there when we got back.