I sat through a teleconference with my friends at Zipp and it lasted about an hour. We went over what’s new on handlebars and wheels; we talked about rim shapes and hookless and the ETRTO and whether Zipp is going to get more into the tire business (you’ll know when I know). And then they said, “We only have a few minutes left and we have one more thing to show you.”
Whoa! Now, you may think this just a stocking stuffer, but we here at Slowtwitch have been on about this issue of the mounting of electronics. Look at Matt Hill’s article series on Lezyne’s lights, and his long tangent on mounting. He writes, “My friends, Go-Pro mounts aren’t just for cameras anymore. I currently have at least one Go-Pro mount on all the bikes I ride, and it’s actually pretty rare that they see a camera. They wind up carrying a light 90 plus percent of the time.”
Not long after Matt’s piece, the Cervelo Caledonia was introduced here, and that bike contains a lot of modern features not found on other road bikes, one of which is the full integration, front and rear, of GoPro style mounts.
I asked Zipp to send me the new tchotchke it showed me at the end of the presentation. It’s a second faceplate that replaces the stock one, and on that faceplate is a built-in mount with a Garmin/Wahoo style mounting disc on one side and a GoPro-style mount on the other. Wow. That took a long time. Maybe I’ll get reader feedback of all the other stems that have this feature and, if so, as usual I’m last to the party! I just haven’t seen this yet, and the stem faceplate has been sitting out there for many years waiting to be exploited in ways just like this.
It’s the QuickView, and it’s very well thought out. What I really like about this item is that you don’t have to spend a zillion bucks to get it. It’s $70, and I was ready to hear the typical bike biz thing of: We’ll downstream it after all the apex customers overpay for the halo version. Happily, no.
You won’t find this on Zipp’s site by looking at stem category, which is where I looked in vain. You’ll find it by looking at its accessory category. If you look at Zipp’s stems you’ll see that you can spend from $265 for a stem and you can spend down to $56. Happily, this faceplate works on the $56 stem and stems up to the $265 level (Service Course, Service Course SL, and SL Speed models, and another designed for use with the SL Sprint). This means it’s available, if you consider both Service Course and Service Course SL stems, in lengths from 60mm up to 150mm, in 10mm and a few 5mm increments, and in +/- 25°, 17°, and 6°.
In the images you see here a put the QuickView on a Service Course SL stem, which is a $112 stem.
The QuickView is flippable. This means the head unit can be mounted lower or higher, and if you flip the faceplate you can flip the extension so it’s still mounting-disc-up. Of couse it’s all Torx T-25 bolt heads, because of the religious conversion to Torx made by SRAM and all its daughter brands. I’m agnostic. It’s fine.
As you’ll note in the image just above, on this particular bike I had a garden variety Easton stem of some older vintage and the stem is fine. I’m a snob about some things, but not stems. A stem’s a stem. But If you look at me trying to mount a largish Garmin 1080 on a fairly long SRAM mount, the faceplate is too proud for the head unit. This is a common issue. We try to cram our head units past the protruding faceplate hardware and the mount on the head unit breaks.
As you see, plenty of room with the QuickView. While not pictured, I place the 1080 on there and there was room to spare. You can orient the angle so that your head unit is flatter or angled toward you and however you orient it the camera mount allows you to orient the camera angle on its own.
I’m sure you’re aware of this kind of disc, where it’s a Garmin mount if the disc is pointed in a particular direction, and rotating that 90° makes it a Wahoo mount. Two small screws reorient the mount in this case. I loosed the screws in the image above, so you see see it's even easy enough for me.
It's in its Garmin config above. Below, you'll see that I've oriented it for a Wahoo mount.
There is one hitch in the getalong, if you order this, and it’s currently quite hard to navigate. And look, here’s what’s going to happen. You don’t have a Zipp stem now, do you? So, you’ll end up doing what I did: You’ll get the stem so that you can get the mount. But, there are two versions of the QuickView, and you have to order the right version for the stem you order. Here’s one version of the QuickView, and it’s the one you see here, for the Service Course SL and Service Course. Here’s another version of the QuickView, for the SL Sprint stem. By God! Order the right QuickView! Because, I can see how someone would see QuickView on the accessories page, assume there’s only the one, order it, and the you get your feelings hurt when your stem and accessories all show up.
In my opinion – were it me – I’d have the QuickViews on Zipp's “stem” category page and I’d only have one option, one link, and the user makes a choice between stem type so that he doesn’t inadvertently order the wrong QuickView. I’d also (by the way) have the QuickView appear as an upgrade option during the online ordering process on every stem product page, sort of like, would you like Curly Fries with your Whopper? In this case, I think the product is so new, and website coding time always seems so compacted, that Zipp is going to take a little time to integrate this product into a good shopping experience flow.
But the bottom line here is that this is a really good product for road and gravel. Possibly for tri, but only if you’re riding a more mortal version of a tri bike without an integrated front end (and stem). It works with a camera underneath (as you can see in the images above) or with various lights offered by Niterider, Light and Motion, Bontrager, Gloworm, Lezyne.
