I had had it out with the bicycle mirror last week, but my engineer surprised me a couple days ago with the fully installed mirror. Still the same wrong mirror, and on the original mountain bike I was trying wrongly to put it on, as described in Helpless Female Versus the Bicycle Mirror. But he is a problem-solving inventor and comes up with the simplest ways around things. He also thinks in terms of PVC pipe and sees beyond the intended purposes of items.
The solution for my bike was made easier by an unidentified part on the handle bars. There is probably a technical name… it is a clamp-like piece that circles the handle bar right up next to the center, where the handles stick out parallel to the ground from the main frame. The piece is not a complete circle, though. It has two ends that meet with flat portions that rise up for a screw to bring them together. It was not doing anything else that he could see.
However, the mirror was not going to be useful right in the center like that. When he experimented with moving this circular clamp out farther on the handle bars, he found that the handles got narrower, too narrow for the circular clamp to tighten down. He solved this by cutting a small circle of PVC pipe (that is the white you see in the photo) the same width as the circular clamp. PVC pipe comes in different thickness, but he found a scrap that was just the right added diameter. He did need to cut about 1/2 to 3/4 inch out of one side of the PVC circle in order to slip it sideways onto the handle. It would have been way too much work to take everything off of the end of the handle bar. The circular clamp could then be tightened snuggly in place over it at a more convenient location.
Finally, the mirror could be screwed onto another projection on the circular clamp using all the original bolts that came with the Mirrycle Original Bicycle Mirror
Knowing my engineer, he would have made a similar circular clamp if there hadn’t already been one on the bike. And I know he has a supply of bolts that should last for years in the case of an apocalypse, so that would not have been the limiting factor. Really, I seem to have purchased the right bicycle mirror after all. Or everything is just always right with my engineer.