Organizing my riding gear: Helmets on the wall

I scored a major bike storage win with the installation of the Feedback Sports Velo Hinge swiveling bicycle wall hook. After that, I thought – what else could I do to clean up my cycling gear around the house?

My helmets looked like a good place to start. While road bike helmets aren’t anywhere near as bulky as a full-face motorcycle or automotive equivalent, they’re still pretty awkward things to find storage for.

The solution came to me via 3M’s “Command” line of adhesive hooks and fixtures. Command’s foundation lies in two-sided adhesive strips of various sizes, which you then stick to a wall or other surface. The other side of these strips is then stuck to a variety of hooks, holders, and other storage solutions. If, for some reason, you want to remove said hook or holder, the Command strips can be removed cleanly, without leaving any residue.

The retail package contains two cord bundlers and three medium Command strips.

Among the usual hooks in the lineup, one of the more unique Command fixtures is their cord bundler. As the name suggests, this fixture is meant to tidy up loose electrical cords and wiring, although it could also work for any lightweight rope, twine, or similarly long objects.

Here’s one as installed on my wall. The hard plastic base is anchored to the Command adhesive strip. Below it is a pliable, rubbery plastic loop (polyethylene, I suspect) that wraps around cords. At its forward end is a flared tongue which hooks back onto the hard plastic base, where it slides into a groove and bundles the whole shebang.

I had the crazy idea of having the polyethylene loop poke through the vents of my helmets, then hooking it into the hard plastic base. Effectively, the cord bundler holds the helmet fast against the wall instead.

On the Lazer Tonic, which has a vent in the center, this worked perfectly. On the Lazer Blade MIPS, where its front vents sit both sides of a center spine, it’s not as clean a solution, as it won’t hang against the wall perfectly centered, but it works just as well otherwise. I can even hang the helmets with their interiors facing out, to facilitate drying.

I have this “helmet hook array” installed right next to where Hyro hangs off the wall, making for a neat arrangement.

The main downside to Command products is cost, I guess, plus a slight bit of complexity. While 3M brags that the fixtures are easily relocated as long as you have spare strips, the strips themselves come in varying sizes (small, medium, large, extra large), and each size seems to have a load rating. The cord bundlers I’ve talked about here use one medium strip each. If you decide you want these fixtures elsewhere, or you bungled the initial install, you’ll need extra strips of the same size, and they’re not always in stock at a hardware store. The package does come with some extras.

Wall estate: Command cord bundlers holding my helmets, Command broom holders suspending my house cleaning stuff, and the Velo Hinge hook storing Hyro.

So…not exactly cheap, but it’s a pretty neat solution regardless. I don’t see myself having to move these around in the foreseeable future, so I think I got my money’s worth out of them.