Create Your Own Lights

cycling, mountain biking, night riding | UltraRob | Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 5:29 pm

Whether you do 24 hour mountain bike races or long brevets, having good lights is important. Back in 1997 I was on the Schwinn development team and they let me use a demo unit of their new dual beam halogen lights for the 24 Hours of Moab which was my first 24 hour race. They were so impressed that I did it solo they let me keep the lights plus 2 battery packs. They have been great lights and the batteries last the perfect amount of time for the loop at Moab. I don’t have to worry about using the high beam too much and still have a little left at the end of the lap. The only problem is the batteries are made up of 10 D cell Ni-cads and they are heavy. I now have 5 batteries and I’ve never done over 5.5 night laps at Moab.

For RAAM qualifiers I just use the Cateye EL 500 light since all I need is enough light to be legal since I’m really using the headlights of my follow car. In the past I used the halogen version but it only got 3 hours of runtime versus over 20 hours with the LED one. For Montezuma’s Revenge I’ve wanted smaller batteries for some sections where I wasn’t without my crew for more than an hour. I keep talking of putting together some battery packs from some Ni-cad batteries that were being thrown away at work because a product was discountinued. I have some half C cells that would give me an hour of run time if I only used the high beams part of the time.

An adventure racer has posted instructions on how to build to build some really bright LED lights. He says they were as bright as the expensive light systems light the Nightrider HID. I haven’t decided what races I’m doing next year but I’m thinking one of them will be a 24 hour mountain bike race. It’s been a while since I’ve done Montezuma’s Revenge and I’ve learned a lot about what nutrition works for me since the last time I did it. I’ve also gotten my asthma medications dialed in better. Maybe I should spend some time this winter building up some LED lights with newer battery technology and retire my outdated halogen ones.