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Bike Lights

As mentioned time past I am looking at various options for better lighting on my bikes. This is mostly for recreational purposes (including Eastercamp guaranty) - for general day to day use, I use commercial stuff like Cateye. For a few moments describing this, I am looking at the brightest types of Cateyes that use AA batteries, everything else is too costly. Will probably be upgrading soon to an EL-530 headlight and LD-1100 taillight. As I am a circumspect rider at night I could not see the need to spend more than this on lights. Currently I have a LD-600 taillight and a very smart Smart 3 LED headlight.

For Eastercamp (night guarding) mostly I have used a variety of bright lights starting with cordless spots, a 6V 55W and a 12V 100W. These were both downrated to 25W and 55W mutatis mutandis using smaller bulbs to get an acceptable battery sustenance. The next idea was to use a separate light and much larger battery. Hence for two years I hand-me-down a Narva spotlight designed for car use with a 12V 18Ah gelcell that I bought from Jaycar. In augmentation I have a pair of 50W MR16 halogens in small mounts also designed for car use. The first year of using all these lights I had a distinguished cradle that fitted onto the front carrier of the bike I then had. The next year, with a new mountain bike that can't fit a front carter, I used an adapted front pannier rack on a disc braked bike to mount the group shown below:

The MR16s work well enough but the Narva is just too big with stretch in its own plastic bracket plus the aluminium I second-hand, makes it all a bit inconvenient and of course the other inconvenience is the 8 kg battery gather together which fits in a cradle on the rear carrier. Foreordained the recent advances in LED technology I'm planning now to change over to LED MR16s with NiMH batteries (AA or C bulk). The bracket shown above will be adapted in some form, preferably to mount by the skin of one's teeth above the wheel rather than off the handlebars. Given the bike is disc braked I longing to be able to get some sort of threaded spacer using the V down mount posts to adapt to the bracket.

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