The tonneau cover of the Morgan 3-Wheeler is fixed to the body using with Lift-The Dot fasteners.
Once the cover is removed, you have all around the tonneau a total of 12 Lift-The-Dot male fasteners. Or 5 if you keep half of the tonneau cover on. And we normally don’t think about them for any other use than fixing the tonneau cover.
Thinking about how to secure the video camera – a GoPro mounted on its suction cup between the two little windshields – I could see the central Lift-The-Dot male fastener really close to it, and consequently the best option for a safety anchor system.
The idea of a short fabric lanyard, with a Lift-The-Dot fastener at one end and a small carabiner for the Nylon cord fixed to the GoPro frame at the other, seemed the best option. With such a solution, we wouldn’t have any long cord hanging around inside the cockpit and in front of the instruments.
Here is the drawing of this simple idea:
So, we ordered a little bag of ten Lift-The-Dot socket with backplate fasteners (Part No: 07 at www.woolies-trim.co.uk for just £7.00).
For the carabiners, we just looked into our drawers for those old and never re-used lanyards they give you in every conferences and fairs. And we cut them to retrieve their small carabiners.
For the fabric, in our case, we still have some scraps of the dark brown leather that our upholsterer used to handcraft our luggage set, the back cushion for AM and the steering wheel bag. So, we decided to use those.
As the leather is thicker than, for example, a Nylon strap, we did not overlap the whole lanyard, leaving the end where the Lift-The-Dot fastener will be fixed to with a single leather layer. Otherwise it would have be very difficult, maybe impossible, to fix the fastener. We made three of them, one specifically with a plastic fastener instead of a carabiner for the video camera lanyard (we’ll explain why in our next post).
Here with more details, you can see that the Lift-The-Dot fasteners are on a single leather layer.
The leather strap is glued and sewed. To fix the Lift-The-Dot fastener, I used a couple of very simple tools: a sharp knife and a hole puncher. Using the hole puncher to cut the hole for the male part of the fastener, the one that’s screwed on the edge of the 3-Wheeler tonneau, and the sharp knife to do the small cuts in the leather for the Lift-The-Dot socket tongues that will grab the backplate, and also finishing the leather around the fastener.
The result is an elegant, flexible, and really resistant lanyard you can fix in any of the 12 Lift-The-Dot fasteners available around the tonneau. And on the top of that it’s the same leather than the trim of our 3-Wheeler!
These very simple and easy to make lanyards are useful for very simple things, increasing somehow – it depends on the point of view – the storage capacity of our 3-Wheeler.
We can use them for just a momentary use, such as keeping on hand the garage door remote.
Or the case of your camera…
In our case to secure the GoPro too…
Sunglasses case, your cap, and anything else you can imagine that needs to be on hand while you’re driving or just for a moment.
A simple, easy to make and use and practical solution!