This is how I make my favourite front bike lights currently.
I use these LED torches:
These are quite bright enough for riding without street
lights (even with my dim eyes), giving a good pool of light ahead. They take
one AA rechargeable battery and last over 1 hour. This way they last for any of
my normal trips, and a spare AA is easy in the pocket. I always recharge after
a night ride. We’ve been using these torches for a couple of years now with
very few problems.
I use these brackets:
They are very cheap and once modified, very easy and
reliable to use. They allow adjustment up and down, and side to side (not all
front lights allow this). It is really easy to clip the light into the bracket,
even while riding. That way you can keep the lights in a pannier or your pocket
and mount them when you want them. They also come off easily for looking
elsewhere.
They do need a little modification to be useable.
Here is a photo of the modified bracket:
See the wire yoke is now in a new hole I have drilled in the
plastic lever. The original hole is in the wrong place and just doesn’t hold –
it doesn’t go over-centre.
Also note the string which is wrapped, tied and sealed with
a drop of glue, which holds the rubber liner in place (a very small ziptie can
do this as well). If you don’t do this, the rubber liner will fall out when you
are moving or installing the bracket. This isn’t a big problem until you lose
it in the long grass on the side of the road on a wet night …
The final part of the modification is to change the
self-tapper screw which holds the torch bracket to the handlebar bracket. This
screw here:
The screw supplied is too short and thus holds the bracket
too weakly. It takes a bit of searching (thru your boxes of saved screws) to
find just the right screw with the right sized head. I drill the hole deeper (right
thru) and usually heat the screw up slightly with a small flame before screwing
it in, just to soften the plastic on the way in.
This gives you a bright, good quality, front light for about
$10 plus the cost of the rechargeable battery.
Tail lights
I’ve recently tried some clone/generic tail lights, which
are almost exactly the same as the “Smart” ones I’ve been buying from
Chainreaction, but much cheaper. They each take 2 x AAA batteries. I’d really
like a source of good tail lights which use AA batteries, so I don’t need to
keep 2 different types of battery and so the batteries last longer, but I can’t
find any so far.
So far the generic lights are working just as well as the
branded ones – no failures so far.
In my experience the most frequent way of these tail lights
failing is for the light to get bumped and the battery + light section of the
unit falls off. This has happened to me a few times, sometimes on the road at
night. I now put 2 strips of strong tape on them to provide a backup to keep
them together.
Here are the 2 tail lights:
http://www.dx.com/p/waterproof-3-mode-3-led-red-light-bicycle-safety-tail-light-w-bike-mount-2-x-aaa-108776#.U1BhgF5aMoY
http://www.dx.com/p/3w-2-mode-1-2-led-red-light-bike-bicycle-tail-lamp-2-x-aaa-110252#.U1Bhf15aMoY
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