Lou Holtman wrote:
Joerg schreef op 29-8-2014 0:27:
Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Thursday, August 28, 2014 12:58:45 PM UTC-4, Joerg wrote:
wrote:

http://www.autospeed.com/cms/A_112922/article.html




So when do bike accessory manufacturers finally wake up and build
something like this? Why do things take so long with bicycles?

Until now all the lights I've tried and seen are between "barely bright
enough" and utter junk.

Some of us use hub dynamos and good quality LED headlights. My
utility bike
has a Shimano hub dynamo and a Busch & Muller headlight. It gives me
plenty of light. It does a great job of illuminating the road, with a
nice even beam, and I can see it illuminating stop signs nearly a
quarter
mile away.

The setup isn't cheap. I paid about $65 for the hub, and the
headlight was
a $100 Christmas gift. (I built up the wheel myself.) But I don't
expect
to have to replace the setup for the next ten years. To me, it's worth
the expense. Certainly, it would be cheaper if it were standard
equipment
on every bike; but we have to face the facts, that most people in
westernized countries use bikes as daytime toys. They wouldn't want to
spend the money for a headlight they'd seldom or never use.

While this is a road bike, last week I used it after dark to inspect
some
work we'd recently done in our local forest preserve. I don't know
whether
it would work on a wooded off-road trail at 25 mph, but it allowed me to
do fine on the single track trails I was riding at much lower speed.


Europeans use hub dynamos a lot. It would be possible but difficult on
my mountain bike because it has a serious disc brake up front. I'd be ok
with a central Li-Ion battery if some company made a better holder than
those flimsy Velcro thingies.

The lights I've seen were all plastic and/or on skinny brackets, those
on the Lumotec lights would never survive. I need something that will
survive even if a rock the size of a fist smacks to it. Happens a lot.
Like Tuesday, barreled down a trail to get home, front wheel squished
off a rock that size, it ricocheted from somewhere ... *KANGGG* ...
smack-dab between my right foot and crank. I stopped and it was still
cradled there. Took a chunk out of the crank and my shoe. Earlier this
summer one ricocheted off and crashed into the handlebar. Then there's
the rocks kicked up by other riders. And the occasional thick Manzanita
branch.



You have to realize that your commute route is far from usual.


Not in the Netherlands but in some parts of the world that is usual :-)

Even in your area it can be. I lived in your country for six years, in
Zuid Limburg. I rode over into Belgium a lot and over there we had lots
of remote and rugged mountainous paths that people used as shortcuts.
Many times I almost cussed my dynamo-driven lights because uphill they
produced so little light that I had to hop off the bike and walk it,
mostly to avoid doing an endo in a pothole that I didn't see.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/